Blog Post Number 900

This is the 900th commentary to be uploaded to this blog, according to the metrics maintained by the host service. During the ten and a half years I’ve written for “American Currents,” the blog has amassed more than 77,300 views.

The facts behind those raw numbers show the reality is not as impressive as they make it sound. Due to the vagaries of online traffic, as well as the peculiar history of this blog, the figures are highly inflated.

I’ll sketch a truer picture for the record . . . and then we can return to more substantive content with blog post #901 — from further entries of my “Journal of the Plague Year” to more stories from Portland Walking Tours and tales of my encounters with Harlan Ellison.

“American Currents” was launched in the fall of 2009 by Jeff Weiss, an Atlantic City, New Jersey resident who wanted to host a gathering of commentators to address current events from various political perspectives.

I believe I answered a Craigslist ad to become one of the first writers in his stable — very possible THE first. He and I discussed the proposal for some weeks before he collected enough other writers and felt it was ready to go. Jeff’s concept was that he would pick a breaking news story each day, and several of us would volunteer to write a brief commentary about it from our differing points of view. Jeff would provide graphics, post our pieces together overnight or first thing the following morning, and manage the site generally, as well as contribute occasional pieces.

I came up with the title, “American Currents”: a gentle play on words to suggest various streams of thought as well as “current” in the sense of up-to-the-minute. Although the journal of the North American Native Fishes Association has gone by this name since 1972, I suspect the organization simply didn’t have a web presence back in 2009, because I’m certain I must have done a search to see whether anyone else was using the phrase online. (More recently, various country-music events appear to have adopted the name.)

Our blog launched on November 7, 2009. I’ve described the process at greater length a piece that memorialized Jeff, who died tragically in a motor vehicle accident in the summer of 2017.

Over the next six months I wrote 96 short, three-to-five-paragraph pieces on every topic from Sarah Palin, Tiger Wood’s apology for his sex scandal (considered as a Winter Oympics sport), and Obama’s health-care reform bill . . . to a blogger who tweeted about her son’s swimming-pool drowning as it happened, a New Mexico funeral home horror, a teacher’s aide’s nude photo controversy, and a sexting tragedy (the latter two of which still pick up occasional hits to this day due to random web searches, I would suspect). 

As it turned out, none of the other writers generated as much content as I. Jeff had particular difficulty finding and keeping writers who had a conservative viewpoint, which both he and I hoped for. The blog in its original format eventually collapsed in less than half a year. Jeff formally shut it down on April 30, 2010 . . . and then I decided two weeks later that I wanted to keep writing, albeit at both a slower pace and greater length than several paragraphs per essay.

Which I did. Although Jeff and a few others continued to write every once in a while, by the spring of 2011 “American Currents” was mine by default. For a while, the content was extremely peripatetic, based on whatever was happening in my life or might hit the local news in a big way.

For example, I wrote a series of pieces about a recycling enterprise I tackled in the spring of 2010 . . . the shooting of a short fantasy film in which I played a guy who digs a hole to China . . . the disappearance of Kyron Horman, a 7-year-old boy, that obsessed Portland throughout the summer of 2010 . . . reading all of Proust . . . and an alleged attempt at a terrorist bombing of Pioneer Courthouse Square by a 19-year-old in downtown Portland (which, starting the following spring, would become the space I spent a lot of time in working as a Portland Walking Tour guide!). The Somali-born suspect, a naturalized resident of Beaverton and Oregon State University student, would be convicted two years later and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

In 2011 I wrote about my budding career as a video and film actor and print model (which would take a giant leap forward with a guest appearance on the hit NBC series “Grimm” the following March — a story I see I left unfinished; there’s a bit more about it with photos here). The 33 pieces total I wrote in 2011 were propelled mostly by the Occupy Portland, which commenced that fall. Carole and I participated in the protests to some extent, which gave me plenty to write about. When it was all over, we volunteered to rake the piles of leaves on the site and I meditated on the meaning of Occupy Portland.

For a while in 2012, Jeff and I did an audio podcast on the subject of politics, “Pop2Politics,” and in the ensuing years, my production waxed and waned.

I generated barely a dozen pieces in each of the following two years. Carole posted a brief, frantic call for help on my blog when my brother Toby and I disappeared in the snow-covered Cascade Mountains overnight on March 2, 2013. Thereafter, I uploaded:

• 18 commentaries in 2014
• 15 in 2015 (primarily focused on the disaster that befell my wife, which I described in a series titled “When You Become the Lead Story”)
• 16 in 2016
• 18 in 2017
• 27 in 2018
• and an utter nadir of just 3 essays in 2019, all of them just roundups of Facebook posts of original puns and Portland Streetcar adventures

By my count, up to today I have written a total of 321 commentaries out of the 900 on this blog over the past 11 years come this November . . . although I daresay mine consist of considerably greater content than the other 579, in terms of both sheer verbiage and intellectual substance.

One of the repeated topics of interest for me over the years (since it’s an ongoing, deadly problem, as yet unresolved) has been firearms and gun control. Starting with an incident in which a 57-year-old Oklahoma woman blasted an intruder to eternity with a shotgun in December 2011, I have written about guns many times, from many angles, including . . . an Oregon legislative proposal to legalize concealed carry of handguns (February 2011) . . . an unfortunate shooting involving the LAPD and what it suggests about the myth of the “good guy with a gun” (February 2013) . . . an April 2018 “Open Letter to Second Amendment Enthusiasts” (which boasts a total of 910 hits as of this afternoon, which makes it my single most-visited blog page, though due to web searches for the opposite point of view, I would imagine) . . . and a followup in May titled “The Folly of Guns Versus ‘Government Tyranny’ ”, in which I explored the bigger picture that I believe gun nuts neglect.

In early 2016, I realized I had been doing quite a bit of absorbing storytelling and critical commentary on Facebook, which — best I can ascertain — I joined in September 2008 when, some of you might recall, FB limited every post to just 140 characters. Each began with your name and you “finished the sentence” to notify the world of what you were up to and/or feeling. In January 2011, FB dropped the “finish the sentence that starts with you” layout, but it took another couple of years before we were allowed to write posts of any length . . . which suited me well.

So each year I began to collect the best Portland Walking Tour stories, the most memorable Portland Streetcar adventures, my own wordplay and puns, and even amusing typos or clumsy wordings collected from my proofreading and editing work — and put them on my blog.

It’s also been gratifying to excerpt stories from my book-in-progress about my paternal grandmother who grew up in Alaska, and her future husband’s “cod fishing summer” — when he manned a single-person dory in the Bering Sea in 1920, two years before they met.

Of course, the advent of the novel coronavirus pandemic has been fodder for much original blogging this year, starting with the shock of a nation (and the play I was acting in) grinding to a halt in mid March . . . to my ongoing “Journal of the Plague Year,” in which I collect up my thoughts, observations, on-the-street experiences, and jokes that largely relate to covid-19 and stay-at-home from Facebook and organize them week by week on this site.

A very handy essay, I’m not pleased to say, since mask wearing has become a highly contentious and politicized issue (no thanks again to the President) thereafter, is a piece I posted back on April 24 titled “The Meaning of the Mask.” Rereading it two months later, I don’t see that anything substantive that requires updating or correction.

The supposed 77,372 lifetime views are easily disposed of. My site is regularly bombarded by overseas bots — mostly from Russia and the Ukraine, but my metrics regularly show hits from such locations as Singapore, Finland, Czechia, Vietnam, United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Peru, South Korea, Germany (no, really! 145 hits on June 9!), Hong Kong, various ’stans, and the all-purpose “Unknown region.” 

Here is a representative report, which I captured on May 15. This happens every one or two months if I’ve been posting regularly, myself. Perhaps they aren’t all bots. Maybe a few are the result of actual web searches by people on the far side of the globe who are looking for gun control or nude photos, but I doubt the person on the other side of the screen actually bothered to read whatever piece of mine got dredged up.

Finally, if you’re interested in seeing more of my best material and have some time on your hands, I’d say my favorite blog pieces — apart from some of the ones mentioned and linked above — include:

• my review of “Avatar” (March 9, 2010)
• the true nature of a “hero” (May 24, 2010)
• “Mother is Bleeding” (the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, with incidental oil industry mayhem in Niger and Brazil, June 18, 2010)
• “Beatles Forever,” on the 50th anniversary of their Ed Sullivan Show appearance (Feb. 9, 2014)
• a meditation on the nature of reading (Feb. 12, 2014)
• my advice on how to select a college (Dec. 8, 2014)
• “Being Connected” means disconnecting from yourself (March 18, 2015) 
• Songs that are like old friends, part 2 (a tribute to Gentle Giant, March 21, 2015)
• A quarter century in my beloved city (Feb. 21, 2016)
• The Best Book I Read This Year (Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, Dec. 19, 2016)
• Where I Am, How I See It (an existential statement, Jan. 13, 2017)
• In Praise of Oregon Rain (a reprint of a nearly 30-year-old but still favorite piece, Sept. 18, 2017)
• It’s Raining in Oregon Again … but It’s Ashes This Time (Sept. 7, 2017)
• Just Don’t Look at Him (my prescription for how to survive the worst president ever, March 8, 2018)
• my fond memories of the movie, “Yellow Submarine” (July 8, 2018)
• in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the protests, how I came to understand my place in our nation’s racist history (June 16, 2020)

. . . and of course, a celebration of my wife after two very hard years, how we met, and the tale of our “separate honeymoons.” I’d link all the pieces I’ve published about Harlan Ellison, as well (at least five of them at this point), but most of them are so recent, my friends have likely seen them, or can easily locate them.

Finally, in honor of the friend I never got to meet in person, but without whom this blog would never have given me the opportunity to write about so many things, here is the Facebook page for Jeff Weiss.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled hell-raising. . . .