My dinner with Ajay

By Todd Stadler · Thursday, December 7, 2000 6:01pm

Ajay was here. With Dave!. And while the last leg of the Todd Tour Two-Thousand wasn't as rock-starred as previous ones, it was good. I suppose some 'splainin's in order.

Ajay I know from high school. I think he met me first, so I'll be Todd #1, aka Portland Todd, aka Odd Todd. At the very same high school, Ajay and I met Todd #2, aka LA Todd, aka...hmm, I don't know what his Todd Handle is. Oh well. Most of my conversations with Todd #2 back then consisted of "Hi, Todd" "Hi, Todd". Great stuff. I keep meaning to write a novel about it. Besides this one. Ajay went to college with Todd #3, aka San Francisco Todd, aka Tpodd. I met Tpodd through a completely orthogonal route, being that he works at the same company as and is now dating Xy, for whom I once had a "thing". All very clear.

So Ajay decided to visit all us Todds. There was some business reason behind it all, but that's not important right now. But there was, as Ajay might put it, a Zenny bonus: Dave! joined in the TT2K as well. And yes, his name is, in fact, written with an exclamation point appended to it. This would make sense if you ever met Dave!, as there is very little about him that is not spoken with exclamations.

Anyhow, a time with Ajay and Dave is a good time. We wore cowboy hats to Club 21. We potentially harassed waitresses (who were potentially harassing back) at the Cadillac Cafe. We sang the national anthem in three-part harmony (that at times verged on microtonal, but hey) to no one in particular except a statue of Abraham Lincoln. And we ran around in desperate search of a nice place to look at the sunset each evening.

In short, we were silly. So silly that the whole visit, in retrospect, plays out like some montage of silly acts that people rarely do, all set to some upbeat 80's rock tune by an artist with a reputation for being silly himself, in a movie about friends who are silly. Yes, that silly.

And it made me think. About why I tend not to be so externally silly when I'm by myself. About why certain people bring out such qualities in me. About friends, and leaders, and followers. All manner of deep introspection, none of which is probably interesting, and it certainly isn't silly. So I'll stop it.

And even though I cannot personally say that I was picked up by two girls at a bar just because I seemed "cute", was taken to their house with some other, duller, male, whereupon they both proceeded to make out with me and each other at different times, and was given money for some coffee and a bus ride back to my friend's house, which I pocketed and decided to walk instead, remembering only that said house was between a giant rotating loaf of bread and a giant rotating milk carton... even though I cannot personally claim to have experienced any of that, I had a good time. And I won't name names.