My Friends at the Bar

Usually I'm in bed by like 9pm because 9pm is very late, but last night I had dinner at Bandera in Old Town Scottsdale with my good friends Elayne, Jason and Samantha. They have good cornbread at Bandera and I ate a lot of it. Elayne and I worked together at a company based in Scottsdale a few years ago. It was a small outfit backed by some venture capital money and the managers were really dumb. We would spend hours laughing about their decisions and would often punctuate our conversations with gallows humor about how they could fire us anytime. Eventually it was time for me to go. They came in one day and said "Get out." It went something like that.

Eventually the company was sold to a company based in Paris. I think the final price was about $30m, which was roughly half what that same acquirer had offered a year before, when the CEO flat-out turned them down: "Take your $60m and shove it, I'll show you how it's done and will sell to you for $30m in a year when we're out of cash." So everybody made good money on that transaction. The CEO (the link is a post to his "co-blog", where he talks about being a better leader. God what an idiot) was almost a midget but still had most of his hair so was perpetually proud of himself. He looked a lot like Tyson Beckford only he was older, shorter, had no muscles, wore dumb clothes and his face looked nothing like Tyson Beckford's. Oh yeah and he was white. All that dude ever talked about was leadership. And he was the worst leader ever. I mean he just sucked. He was like the teen-age girl that talks about sex all the time and then you go to have sex with her and she starts crying and just wants you to hold her. What a dumbass.

After dinner we all walked over to this bar, AZ88. That was a very cool place. It was all new to me. Since I was raised a Mormon I pretty much know nothing about anything that normal people like, like mixed drinks, fornicating, having a good time, etc.

But I know a lot about Jesus. If you want to give me a test on Jesus or Joseph Smith or getting married at 16 I would get a really high score and you'd say "Wow that guy is smarter than me." But then you'd test me on pre-marital sex and I'd get like an F-. At AZ88 we sat on this white couch on the patio, the place was brightly lit. Samantha, who is cute and rail-thin, ordered me a chocolate sundae and she and Elayne had some wine. Jason and I had some water and we all talked about the Jerky Boys. At one point Jason was laughing so hard that he drank out of my water glass. His was full so I just started drinking out of his. I didn't mind too much that it probably had some of his spit on it. Samantha also ate some of the ice cream, so don't let her tell you that she didn't because she did. I was there, I saw it.