Oh look. We’re invading Iran next. My money was on Syria, but I guess they’ll have to wait.

Coworker, holding up a set of keys someone left by the printer: “Hey, did someone leave their keys by the printer?”

Me: “Yes, obviously.”

…and the room erupts in laughter.

Thank you, thank you! I’ll be here all week!

There’s a stretch of road near my office that I go a little bit out of my way to ride through on my way in to the office and on my way home. It’s called Laguna Canyon Road, and it’s a stretch about 3.5 miles long of, well, nothing. Just rolling hills and thickets of trees and a pond and, well, nothing. It’s very pretty, very peaceful, and I go that way because it is pretty and peaceful and it’s a nice way to decompress from the traffic on my way to the office and a nice way to decompress from the office on my way home.

Empty space like this is kind of unusual down in Orange County; in fact where I work in Aliso Viejo they’re flat-topping the hills around the office in every direction in anticipation of building yet more cookie-cutter developments. Empty space down here seems to stir a pathological need to, as Joni Mitchell once put it, “pave paradise and put up a parking lot.” OC is not a wildlife-friendly place, is all I’m saying.

So I was really touched and pleased when I first starting taking Laguna Canyon a year and a half ago because there were several signs along the road saying: “We’re keeping it wild — thank you, Irvine Company!” An Orange County developer specifically setting a beautiful area aside and saying “We will not build here”? Who’d a thunk it? I actually felt a little bit of warmth at them over it. I tasted a drop of the milk of human kindness.

But that untouched area is untouched no more. For several months now it’s been under seige by grader and bulldozer and dump truck and steamshovel and teams of construction workers. They’ve graded all 3.5 miles on either side of the road to make a dirt road for the trucks. They’ve carved huge cutouts into the hills on either side. They’ve laid sewer pipes all down the west side. They’ve created huge dirt berms and piles of boulders they’ve dug out of the ground they graded and bulldozed. The pond is turning brown with runoff from the new dirt road. There’s nothing pretty or peaceful about it any more.

“We’re keeping it wild” is apparently a euphemism for “We’re gonna shred this place.”

Who’d a thunk it?

Zoe woke me up for Father’s Day today (so much for sleeping in) to give me the card she had made for me at school. One passage from it leapt out at me:

“I wish you would quit your job.”

Traveling for work sucks sometimes.

Speaking of playing poker… I played in two tournaments in the past two days, both No Limit Hold ’em. I think that’s my favorite variation on poker: Hold ’em is my favorite game, No Limit is my favorite way to play it. It’s not really much of a money game, though. I mean, I’m not rich, you know? I can’t afford to play no limit for cash — the first thousandaire I sit down with is going to eat my lunch simply because I can’t match his stack. So tournaments are the only place it’s safe to play it.

I was doing pretty well in last night’s tournament. We started with something like 19 tables (171 people), and we were down to four tables (36 people) when I got knocked out. If I’d held on ’til the final two tables I would have at least made a hundred bucks or so. But nooooo, I had to bet about 80% of my stack on a flush draw that never came and lost to a pair of queens. I was so short-stacked then that I couldn’t play effectively and I was out of the tourney about 20 minutes later. That’ll teach me to put my whole stack up on a drawing hand, won’t it?

Or maybe not. In tonight’s tourney we were down to five tables from 11 when I went all-in on an open-ended straight against two pair and missed. I was kicking myself all the way out of the club. Un-freakin-believable. You don’t bet your whole stack on something like that, at least not before the final table. Well, you don’t. But I do, apparently. Moron.

Star sighting, by the way. Joshua Malina was playing in tonight’s tournament. But don’t get excited, we were never seated at the same table. I outlasted him, though. He got knocked out about 20 minutes before I did.

I cruised by the site of this morning’s Squirrel Squishing on my way to play poker tonight. There’s no sign of the little guy, not even a greasy spot. Not (pardon the pun) hide nor hair of him.

Now I’ll always wonder: Did someone scrape him up? Did a crow make off with his remains? Or did I not kill him after all? Maybe he was just stunned and shook it off and went back home for a nap.

I like that idea, I think I’ll stick with it. I’ll picture him growing old and scaring his grandkids with stories about “the time a motorcycle came thisclose to running me down.”

Sigh… I killed a squirrel on my way to work this morning. The stupid thing ran out into the street as I was approaching, then stopped. I slowed down a little bit and aimed to miss him on the right, but at the very last possible second he made a break for the safety of the curb and ran right under my front wheel.

Crunch-thump!

Talk about a lousy way to start your day. (Or to end your life, for that matter.)

If Clinton was prosecuted for lying about a blowjob, shouldn’t Bush be prosecuted for lying about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”?

(I’m sure that’s going to land me on Ashcroft’s “Enemies of America” list — I’ll probably disappear into a gulag soon, at the rate things are going here in America lately.)

Beth and I went out on the motorcycle to a new sushi bar tonight. (Well, new to us — it’s apparently been there for years.) Good stuff, we’ll be back. At the end of the feast I told the chef I wanted one more piece of sushi and asked him to choose for me. I do this frequently and the results are mixed. I’ve had sushi chefs give me some really weird shit this way, but tonight I scored big-time. He made me something I’d never had before: seared toro soaked in soy sauce.

Oh. My. God.

It’s 1:20 a.m. and I’m in boxers and dirty socks, but if the phone rang right now with him asking if I wanted another piece, I’d be out the door like a shot. I wouldn’t even stop for shoes.

Before they gave us the check, Beth and I guessed what the total would be. Beth guessed $45, I guessed $134. Total: $140. Ouch!

But, man, that seared toro… I’m drooling now. Poor and drooling.

You so want to be me.

I did jury duty yesterday. I was tempted to go all Forrest Gump on you and end it right there: “I did jury duty today. And that’s all I got to say about that.” But apparently I got more to say because I’m still typing…

I guess I’m just not a People Person, because I seem to get into minor altercations everywhere I go. Today’s beef was with some pinhead who stole my seat.

Early in the day I staked out a prime spot where a chair was tucked into a little alcove in the back of the room away from everything else. It had a wall on the left and cubicle walls on the right and rear — it was basically a little cave where I could stretch out with my feet up on a chair in front of me and isolate myself. I camped out in there with my book and my headphones and was in full anti-social splendor all morning.

After the lunch break, though, I came back to find Nipplehead squatting in my spot. It was a deliberate violation of my morning territorial markings — I knew he knew it was my spot because I’d seen him cruise it a few times in the morning session. I knew then that he was scoping it out for possible squatting after lunch, and that’s exactly what he’d done. I came back early just to prevent this, but he’d beaten me to it. The fucker.

I gave him some stink-eye and sort of threw my bag down in disgust and generally made it pretty clear that I wasn’t happy with his squatting, and then I parked myself right next to the mouth of “his” cave and said to anyone who might be listening that “You’d better not move, then, because I’m taking it back if you do.” He pretended to ignore me and we proceeded to share an uneasy detente for the next hour or so, me reading a book and listening to Mark Cohn on my MP3 player, him listening to his Music For Seat-Stealing Nippleheads CD on his headphones.

And then he had to go to the bathroom.

He made a big fuss about staking out the spot before he left. He arranged the seat just so, positioned his backpack perfectly in the middle, balanced his newspaper on top of that… He made it clear to me and everyone else around that he was Coming Back and this was His Seat. Basically, he flagged it as Saved, and any of you who grew up with brothers and sisters know that a Saved seat is inviolable — you don’t sit there. You just don’t. You can’t. So I didn’t. Instead, I moved his stuff.

I put it all on a chair just outside the alcove, positioning it it there just the way he’d done it himself. His seat was now open. But technically it was still Saved, at least for me. because I’d been there for the Saving process. But not the woman who came by a few minutes later and noticed the empty seat.

“Is someone sitting there?” she asked me.

“I don’t think so,” I replied innocently. “I think he left.”

And so she sat down.

When Nipplehead got back, he clearly didn’t know what to do. He hemmed and hawed for a couple seconds, and made a big show of being pissed off about losing his seat, but the woman didn’t move — and probably never even considered it — because she didn’t know what his problem was. He eventually gave me some major stink-eye and then grabbed his stuff and moved to a different seat on the other side of the room. Ha!

Me, I was satisfied. I’d lost my seat, but now he couldn’t have it either. I could live with that kind of balance.

I never did get picked for a jury. Probably just as well — you wouldn’t want someone this juvenile on your jury, would you?