Costa Mesa blogger Geoff West opts to extinguish ‘A Bubbling Cauldron’

After almost a dozen years of stirring the pot in the local political realm, Eastside Costa Mesa resident Geoff West has decided to hang up his keyboard and cease publishing his blog, A Bubbling Cauldron.

In a farewell post published Sunday, West said he made the call partly due to health reasons and because he wants to spend more time traveling with his wife, Susie, who recently retired.

“I’ve enjoyed nearly every single second of the time I’ve spent presenting my thoughts for you, my loyal readers,” he wrote. “Some of you have become more informed, others have been entertained and more than a few have been angered. I smile when I think of all those reactions to what I write.”

During a phone interview Monday, the 43-year Costa Mesa resident said the decision wasn’t easy.

“How am I going to spend the rest of my day?” he asked. “That’s the question. It’s a big change because in a typical week I would spend at least 30 hours a week doing blog-related stuff, or more. I know I’ve had some 60-hour weeks.”

That schedule has become more difficult to keep up, though, since West suffered a pulmonary embolism in June — an ordeal that nearly cost him his life.

With his 50th wedding anniversary and 76th birthday both coming up in August, he said it was time to enter a new chapter.

“I’ll still pay attention,” he said, “but doing a blog every day is a big time commitment for me.”

West’s journey as a writer began roughly 15 years ago, when he first submitted a commentary piece to the Daily Pilot. After that published, he wrote another. Then another.

So it went, he said, until “it reached a point where I realized I had more things to say than I had space to say it.”

He started blogging on July 9, 2005. Since then, he estimates he’s penned more than 3,400 entries that have accumulated more than 3 million total views combined.

Over the years, he’s become a fixture at events and meetings in Costa Mesa. He could almost always be seen in the same back-row seat at City Hall — armed with a notepad and camera to log the proceedings.

West has regularly been included on the Daily Pilot 103 list, which recognizes influential people. OC Weekly named A Bubbling Cauldron the county’s “best blog” in 2008 and 2014.

The man who called himself “The Pot Stirrer” wasn’t just a documenter, however. He regularly peppered his posts with politically charged and sometimes caustic commentary. The Cauldron’s motto, after all, was “a few facts and a lot of opinion.”

“I’ve made probably as many enemies as I have friends,” West acknowledged.

Online reaction to the blog’s end illustrates the split. In one community Facebook group, Costa Mesa Public Square, some commended his efforts over the years while others blasted him.

Perhaps no one was the target of West’s wrath more often than City Councilman Jim Righeimer.

West regularly criticized the councilman in his posts. On Sunday, just a few hours before publishing his swan song, West wrote a piece denouncing Righeimer as “the single worst thing to happen to this city over the more than four decades I’ve lived here.”

The two men also sparred publicly in 2014, when Righeimer demanded an apology after West posted a Facebook comment comparing the way the then-mayor ran the city to Adolf Hitler.

“West’s blog is an attack on this council daily,” Righeimer said at the time. “There’s no truth in it. He continues to lie about the council.”

On Monday, Righeimer largely declined to comment on the end of A Bubbling Cauldron or West’s latest piece, saying only that he wishes “him the best in his retirement.”

West’s retirement became official Monday, when he skipped that night’s Planning Commission meeting — something that didn’t escape those in attendance.

“He proved that citizen journalism can work,” commission Vice Chairman Byron de Arakal, who’s known West for 17 years, said during the meeting. “I disagreed with a lot of stuff he wrote, and we talked about it on the phone quite a bit, but he’s a great guy, and his heart’s in the right place.”

Just because his blogging days are behind him doesn’t mean West plans to stay completely out of the political fray.

“It’s hard for me to imagine not reacting to things that are happening politically, somehow,” he said, “but I can burp out a Facebook comment in 30 seconds instead of having to write a blog post about it.”

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