Jeff Dowdder is a the standard California Surf Dude character with a few twists, one of which is he’s a drummer in a death metal band called Darque Hors. Another is that, at times, he’s a “part time professor” of “mechanical physics” at Cal Tech university. Many of his characteristics, including his speech pattern and authoritative style, are based on my late, beloved friend Paul Compton. Jeff has an oddly intellectual and methodical approach to things. He makes the vague references to weed and such but he’s mostly into surfing, music, left wing politics, personal freedom and the occasional bad drum lessons he gives.
Jeff is an amalgam of so many people I grew up with in the San Gabriel Valley and spent summers with at Newport Beach. He has the ever present friend he talks about who we rarely if ever see, Toby Beau. He has a girlfriend who is in the background as well. He talks about crazy ideas that are possible only in a weed marinated mind like getting Jesus DNA from the Shroud of Turin and cloning him. Jeff is the guy who brings that weird stuff up when the hour is late and the marijuana haze hangs heavy in the air.
Jeff for me is a character to use when you want a total know-it-all who doesn’t know all that much, especially when the topic is something esoteric