Remembering My Faraway Friend, Jeff Weiss

Last Friday, I needed to get in touch with Jeff Weiss, the fellow who launched this blog nearly eight years ago. When I went to his Facebook page, I was shocked to see the caption “Remembering Jeffrey Weiss” . . .

Paging down, I read memorials, farewells, and tearful messages from friends and family of my ’net colleague. Further down, I found links to news stories about his death in a car collision near his home west of Atlantic City, New Jersey on June 17. Jeff’s car was stopped when another vehicle rear-ended it in Egg Harbor Township as he was heading home to Mays Landing, and Jeff was pronounced dead at the scene.

I had never met him in person, but we had worked together online for most of the past eight years, and occasionally talked by phone as well as chatted on live and recorded podcasts. I always assumed I would meet Jeff someday, but now I know I never will.

In the fall of 2009 I was going through huge changes: I’d been laid off in early July from the full-time job I’d held nearly five years, and was trying to secure unemployment benefits and temp jobs here in Portland while looking for another full-time position. But I was also launching a side career as a commercial actor and model at the fairly advanced age of 50.

The preceding five years I had done a lot of stage acting, from Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks to Tom Stoppard and children’s theater, but now I had flexible weekdays and could try going after commercial video and film work, and even print modeling, much of which pays far better, if less often. I wrote a bit about how that went on this blog two years later.

I think I answered a Craigslist ad that fall for a (nonpaying) project that Jeff was trying to start: a blog in which commentators with contrasting political perspectives offered their opinions on breaking news stories and broader developments. Jeff would pick the topics and anyone in the pool could choose to comment on them.

Mostly, he planned to host it: choose the stories, find graphic links, introduce each topic, and only occasionally write his own commentaries. I came up with the blog’s title, “American Currents”: a gentle play on words intended to suggest various streams of thought as well as “current” in the sense of up to the minute.

Most of the other writers who signed on were young, inexperienced (unlike me, I doubt any of them had either published a book or worked as a full-time newspaper reporter), and they couldn’t keep up the pace. Over the next five months, they mostly fell silent, and Jeff announced at the end of April 2010 that he was shutting down the blog.

But I kept having ideas for things I wanted to write about, so we revived American Currents several weeks later. Posts lengthened from his original three-paragraph concept, but became far less regular. Though Jeff and a couple of the other original writers submitted a few pieces in the ensuing months, by the spring of 2011 “Jeff's blog” had become mine by default, because I was generating all the content. He was content to remain the administrator and pay the service provider and URL fees.

Over the next few years, we exchanged emails over the content and character of the blog, but we didn’t talk much about ourselves. I gathered Jeff had been raised Catholic in the Atlantic City area, and he graduated from St. Joseph High, a coed parochial school in Hammonton, NJ -- close to the Pennsylvania border southeast of Philadelphia. He was employed at various Atlantic City casinos for a good while, and later worked for AT&T, the Arc of Atlantic County (a disability services and support organization), and Woodland Community Association.

As a young teen, Jeff had been a fan of Ronald Reagan (while the first national election I could vote in was 1984, and I voted firmly against the President), but he later grew to regret that. Jeff shifted to the center politically, became a Democrat, and would eventually work for local campaigns as well as for Hillary Clinton.

He was also a big fan of pop culture. In the summer of 2011, Jeff teamed with Mark Roberts, another celebrity and TV watcher, to produce a podcast via BlogTalkRadio called Pop2Reality. (Jeff was such an avid follower of reality shows that after his death, “Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Teresa Giudice tweeted a tribute that called him a “superfan.”)

In the winter of 2012, Jeff proposed that he and I co-host a companion podcast to Pop2Reality that would focus on political topics. We launched Pop2Politics on January 30, 2012 with a discussion of the GOP primary candidates; I think at that point they were Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum, though Jeff mentioned the future President No. 45 in passing.

We did more than two dozen Pop2Politics shows that year, on topics from the Catholic Church versus Obama (Feb. 13), to marijuana legalization (Oct. 8), and of course two hours of live election night coverage (Nov. 7). Several shows addressed Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath during that season, since Jeff lived right on the scene.

I also appeared on the May 2 Pop2Reality show as a guest to talk about my experience auditioning and landing a guest appearance on an episode of “Grimm,” the NBC fantasy series shot here in Portland . . . and at Jeff’s urging, I believe, I pre-recorded readings of my own writing for the Sept. 30/Oct. 1 show of Pop2Politics because I had a scheduling conflict on its usual broadcast night. All these podcasts can be streamed or downloaded for free from the Pop2Reality iTunes page.

I didn’t talk to Jeff often in the past few years; just posted sporadic blog commentaries. I wrote about reading Proust, an alleged Islamic bomb threat in Pioneer Courthouse Square (then in my neighborhood, now the place where I go to work at least once a week for Portland Walking Tours), the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ debut on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” and a Portland ballot measure on whether to fluoridate its water. In the fall of 2011, I wrote a flurry of pieces about Occupy Portland, since I was living close to the eye of that hurricane and ended up participating in a small way.

Less than a month after my wife and I had moved to our new home in an apartment on Portland’s fast-developing South Waterfront, she was knocked down by a cyclist who ran a red light, and spent two-and-a-half days in the hospital and the better part of a year in healing and physical therapy.

I wrote about the sequence of events, including my successful efforts to get video footage of the incident and coverage on the local news, on this blog. (I’ve linked to the final in the series of eight commentaries because there are easy links to all the rest at the bottom of the page.)

Last winter, Jeff wrote me that he wished we had revived Pop2Politics last year since it had been such a crazy campaign. When he had worked at the (now closed) Trump Plaza Casino and Hotel, the Tropicana, and Caesars Atlantic City, Jeff had occasion to attend meetings with the future forty-fifth Chief Executive, dine with him, and stay as a guest at Mar-a-Lago.

In a private Facebook IM on January 31, he told me: “I’m completely terrified at what he will do as president.” I asked for his impression of the newly inaugurated President from his past experiences as an employee, and Jeff wrote: “Reckless, impulsive, no comprehension of consequences, a narcissist in the true clinical sense of the word. Everyone was judged based on loyalty. High ranking executives that didn’t deliver results remained and were rewarded if he felt they were loyal to him.

“Effective workhorses were let go if they challenged him or even made suggestions he didn’t like. He took unsolicited suggestions as personal insults.” All of this has become old news to the rest of us now.

Obviously, I’m still writing for the blog that started from an idea of Jeff’s, though the contents have grown steadily more personal: I've written more than once about my adventures on the Portland Streetcar, working as a guide for Portland Walking Tours, and Carole's recent treatments for breast cancer (the bad side and the good), as well as political and cultural topics that were more like what we used to do when Jeff was firmly at the helm.

Since it has been chugging along just fine, with me posting whenever I felt like it, several months went by before I discovered its founder is no longer with us.

I was very sorry to learn of it. And disappointed that now I will never get to meet Jeff Weiss.