Losing your phone has a fairly elegant catch-22 built into it: the one thing that would most help you find your lost phone is your lost phone. My brain involuntarily generated “solutions” that got promptly fed into the catch-22’s buzzsaw: Why not phone Thurmond Slackjaw and see if you left your phone back at the last demo! Oh, I’ll bet it’s there. Ha, ha! Problem equals solved.

These “solutions” would, at least initially, make my heart soar like a pigeon released moments before the Super Bowl. I was already looking forward to rewarding myself with a visit to the most decadent place in San Francisco: the Walgreens candy aisle. The Walgreens candy aisle has everything that a middle-aged man who no longer drinks and plays video games for a living could possibly desire, including Good & Plenty, which is a licorice-flavored candy that is the size and shape of prescription-grade Vicodin.

These high spirits were always followed by audible palm smacks to the forehead when I realized that I could not actually phone Thurmond Slackjaw to see if my phone was “still there.” I couldn’t fucking phone anyone. Because—and, for some reason, this is extremely challenging to remember in the first few minutes after losing your phone—I no longer had a telephone to call anyone on.

My brain started flopping around like an idiot trout on a fisherman’s dock. I know, my brain thought, I’ll text Jared Winklebean. Oh, wait. Buzzsaw. OK, the hell with that idiot Jared Winklebean. I’ll send an email to Haley Lumburger. Oh, wait. Buzzsaw. After a few more oh-wait-buzzsaws, my brain flopped a little less. Then it stopped flopping altogether. A full-body numbness set in. I was still moving around like a human being, telling people that I wanted chicken for lunch or whatever, but I felt like I’d been hit in the neck with a surprisingly robust tranquilizer dart.

The cameraman stayed behind at the Courtyard Marriott. No reason to drag him through this mess. I told him that I’d be back soon, though between you and me, I wasn’t sure at that time that I’d be back that day at all. I didn’t know what I’d find out there. I didn’t know how my findings—good or bad—would effect me. Maybe I’d decide to go back to my hotel. Maybe I’d feel sorry for myself and say the hell with the rest of the trip entirely and head to the airport. Maybe a guy who had a goddamned stroke a year ago and was still trying to get back on his feet shouldn’t be on this kind of trip anyway. I mean, if you were looking for an answer as to whether or not you were recovered, losing your phone during your first day of shooting certainly looked like a fairly definitive answer, didn’t it?

Of course I thought that. How could I not think that?

San Francisco is a city I’ve visited many times in my life, though—as I quickly discovered—I didn’t know it nearly as well as I’d presumed I did. As soon as I stepped onto 2nd Street, my hand automatically slid into the back pocket of my pants where I keep my phone (or rather, used to keep my phone). And when my hand found nothing but a vast denim void, I confess, I panicked in a very real way. I felt the eerie, amorphous chill of disconnection.

This is probably going to sound like hyperbole, but it’s true: I was untethered from everything that matters to us. When I say everything, I mean everything: I had no email, no Internet, no Facebook or Twitter, and no GPS. Without those things, I felt like a kind of futuristic Charles Dickens ghost. Ironically enough, I was a futuristic Charles Dickens ghost in arguably the most hyper-connected square-mileage in the world. An Uber programmer was probably farting within six feet of where I was standing—literally.

GPS is always a fun, useful tool, even in the city that you live in. For me, that’s Vancouver, British Columbia. If I need to find a breakfast place on Granville, I GPS it and, boom, I have the answer. I probably haven’t walked a half block out of my way in the last five years thanks to GPS.

But GPS, while helpful when it comes to finding breakfast places in Vancouver, is absolutely essential in a city that I don’t know well, i.e. San Francisco. With my hand still in my empty back pocket, I realized that I hadn’t tried—not tried in a real way—to find my way around anywhere in years. I hadn’t actually looked at any buildings, or streets, or storefronts, or people in ages. I’d looked almost exclusively at my phone. That I had been, if I was being honest, GPS-ing my way through my life, block by block, no matter where the fuck I was. Even when I was in Tokyo in 2013, I remember the maps on my phone better than I remember the city itself.

The phone is the place where the answers are kept, for better or worse.

I couldn’t remember the last time that I actually looked for something without looking at my phone first. I couldn’t remember the last time I was OK with letting myself get lost; I couldn’t remember the last time I simply used, or even tried to use, my animal instincts. Men used to take pride in their ability to find things. Did I even have a masculine sense of direction anymore? Or had it fallen off the way our tails had during evolution once we no longer needed them?

I was about to find out.