Deadlines suck.

Monday morning deadlines suck worse.

Monday morning deadlines that follow a freakishly hot March weekend suck worst of all.

So it was high noon on Saturday and I was parked in front of my computer. I had already wasted a good 30 minutes procrastinating in The Comics Curmudgeon's archives and this much was already clear: there was no way I was going to get anything accomplished with all those damn birds chirping and lawn mowers blaring outside.

Then I remembered the iPod. Pete had left it in my car the night before. "Shucks," I thought. "I've got a fully loaded mp3 player at my disposal. I'd be a sucker to sit inside all day and work."

Four minutes later I was on my to the coast with another man's iPod. After spending all those hours cooped up inside Pete's cubicle at Willamette Week, it clearly needed to live a little. "Pete never takes me anywhere," the sleekly-designed, expertly marketed mp3 player whined. "It was all fun and games when he first bought me. Now it's like the magic's gone. He hasn't even uploaded the new Mars Volta album onto my hardrive yet."

I was determined to show the thing a good time...or at least take pictures of it in front of various Oregon coast landmarks ala that one urban legend about the wacky, fun-loving kids that took their elderly neighbor's clay garden gnome on a whirlwind trip around the world and then left both it and a stack of photos on his doorstep a few months later. So how did Pete's iPod spend last Saturday? Over the next few days I'll roll out pics from the trip on one condition: no one reading this blog can tell Pete. It's a secret. If he found about me gallivanting around the coast with his iPod he'd be hella' mad. Or super-pissed. Or mildly irritated. Whatever.



So what did Pete's iPod have to say about the historic Oney's sign?

"I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay
Watching the tide roll away
Ooo, I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time"

More of this nonsense tomorrow.