I hung out at Hotel Figueroa on Monday night with some of my fellow Metro-bloggers. I was in no condition to be having any alcohol since my post-Coachella body was like one of those sponges you find abandoned in the desert. But I had some anyway, and it probably cost me my iPod.

Wait, no, no, it was just boring ol’ inattention and forgetfulness that did that. I left it on our table. It’s a black iPod and there were a lot of shadows draped about. The place was near empty as closing time was drawing near, so it made perfect sense to me, after getting off the Metro and realizing it was gone, that the only person who might have seen it would have been whoever bused our table. And since the world is a good and honest place, they’d have saved it for me. I was confident of that. I had some good karma saved up; On Sunday I saw a girl drop her Coachella ticket, so I picked it up and gave it to her. I should have gotten a reprieve for this one.

But no.

I called the Hotel Figueroa twice and then yesterday, in exasperation, went in and talked to the manager. I explained that I left my iPod and I just wanted to make a decent effort to get it back. He nodded and said he understood. In a very tentative and tactful way, he put forth the notion that there’s a chance someone NOT on staff found it (which put us in a weird semiotics zone, since it was suddenly becoming too easy for the word “found” to mean “stole.”) Yes, of course, I agreed. I’d already thought of that one. It was my second most-likely scenario, right above my vague suspicion that Muqtada al-Sadr stole found it. Since the bar was closed at the moment, there was not much else we could do, so I left him my phone number and he promised to call if they found it.

You know, under a sofa cushion or something.

I don’t think I’ll see it again. I’m not devastated. It’s just a hunk of metal. I still have all the music here on Deep Blue. But seriously, what a pain. I especially believe that now because the other Will got me thinking about another potential culprit. I was so quick to blame a human, but what it had been cats? Seriously, cats with laser cannons? Or ghosts of cats? Or cats possessed by the ghosts of dead hotel residents? You know, cats’re pretty sneaky.

With all the threats out there, it’s hard to believe we hang on to our stuff as long as we do.