If you haven’t heard already, Jon Swift a/k/a Al Weisel died unexpectedly. I did not know him personally, but many who did have written moving tributes in remembrance of his all too short life. You can find links to them at Skippy’s place and at this Facebook group which I urge you to join if you are a Facebook member.
Jon’s writing was consistently hilarious, and consistently of the highest quality. I will miss his blog posts, but even more I will mourn the loss of the man, brother, son and friend who existed outside the electronic world of the internet. His humor was always dead on, but also never cruel or mean-spirited. He was too good for those who suffered the barbed arrows of his wit.
May all those whose lives he touched with his writing remember him.
i feel so sorry for his mother. He fell ill on the way to his father’s funeral.
My heart ached when I read that. I posted a remembrance of Jon Swift over on my blog. When I stepped neck-deep in to the steaming pile that was “Blog Amnesty Day,” only to find myself in the kind of shitstorm only the blogosphere can muster, without so much as a poncho, he reached out to me with encouragement and support.
Actually, he indirectly helped me decide to continue blogging — which I was thinking about giving up at that point.
His last post:
“Sometimes there are no words”
A short comment linking to the news of the death of a friend’s son… Followed by silence.
One comment I read in another diary noted that Al died of a broken heart on the way to his father’s funeral. And a comment from one of his friends at the facebook page left me laughing. Apparently at a younger age he was a conservative. The reasonable conservative may have watched his fellow conservatives drift further and further rightward? Truth can be as strange as fiction.
RIP Al.
This is very sad. He was a fabulous writer. Humor, of that quality, is entirely too rare in political writing.