Could I find my way around San Francisco without the use of my phone? To my surprise, it seemed that I could. What I did was this: I looked for real-world objects that I had noticed en route to the Marriott Courtyard earlier. For example, I saw a group of 10 or 15 bored Japanese teenagers hungrily smoking cigarettes in the entryway to a tiny cafe. I saw a health-food store with a weathered cowboy painted on the sign out front. The cowboy was supposed to look intimidating, like he was about to engage in a barroom brawl or a shoot-out. But he didn’t look intimidating to me; he looked like he was vexed by the vague, nagging shit smell that seems to bizarrely permeate the San Francisco streets. Finally, I saw a neon sign, still lighted for some reason despite the daytime hours, hanging in the blacked-out windows of a bar. The sign said: WOODEN CANOE ALE.

San Francisco, man.

Jesus H.

Each of these “landmarks” was an indication that I was on the right track. As long as I continued to see things that I’d seen earlier that morning, I knew that I was making progress. And as I made progress, my confidence began to build.

I was doing all of this by exclusively using my animal instincts. I could feel the long dormant neural pathways in my brain opening up again and firing—really firing—for the first time in years. I was seeing things—cowboys smelling bad smells, smoking teenagers—and feeling things—pride, embarrassment, relief, etc.—that I didn’t usually see or feel. I wasn’t preoccupied with a cartoon GPS map; I wasn’t listening to Siri’s condescending voice. I was here, really here, nothing more. The streets began to arrange themselves underneath my feet like grand Tetris pieces.

First stop was back at the Moscone Center press room. The press room is the hive where all the worker-bee reporters gather to tap out their frantic blog posts and newswire stories on their dilapidated laptops. For me, the press room is always the hub of the GDC wheel. My friends and colleagues are usually here at various intervals throughout the day. There is free coffee and tea, and fairly decent macadamia nut cookies, if you like macadamia nut cookies, which I do. Was my phone here, in the press room? It was not. One of the helpful press room attendants gave me directions to the Moscone Center’s “Lost & Found” room.

I love the idea of Lost & Found rooms. I always picture vast warehouses filled with magical objects, like the anonymous warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I didn’t find a Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse in the Moscone Center. Instead, what I found was this: a beige, unmarked, closed door. Maybe the door wasn’t even beige; a more accurate description would be “A Woefully Uninspired Light Brown That Was Once A Virile, More Formidable Beige.”

Behind the door was a small room that was occupied by a single piece of furniture: a desk. Behind the desk sat an old woman. She was black and had cloudy, grey eyes. She wore an ill-fitting man’s blazer, dark blue, with the logo of a security company printed on the breast pocket. Her grey eyes were, I thought, in the early stages of cataracts, though it had also obviously been years, possibly even decades, since she’d seen anything—anything at all—that had genuinely excited her.

I told her about my lost phone. She nodded, not unkindly. Her grey eyes blinked once. I thought of her as one of the Graeae, i.e. the three witches in Greek mythology who are blind but have access to a single eye, which they have to share. The old Graeae in the navy blazer opened a desk drawer and reached inside. She pulled out a phone, though I could tell right away that it wasn’t mine.

Back out on the street and still frustratingly phone-less, I made my way to the expansive but oddly claustrophobic lobby of the Marriott Marquis. Why claustrophobic? Tough to say. Maybe it’s the dark wood on the walls or the absurdly low-ceilings. I wanted to find the interior decorator, grab him by the lapels of his jacket, and say, Why not open this place up a little, buddy? You should have let it breathe a bit more, buddy.

This is the sort of thing your brain can do when it’s not distracted by having a phone to look at all the time: You can imagine fictional arguments that you’d be having with fictional decorators in hotel lobbies.

Ironically, I watched a procession of people walking single-file from the elevators to the front door, and each person in the procession was blindly looking at his or her cellphone. I felt like a man who was parched from his long, semi-tragic journey across a desert and who now had to endure watching a string of people casually stroll by while openly guzzling infinite amounts of water.

It is difficult if not impossible to find a person, especially at a tech-centric convention like this one, who is not looking at at a cellphone at any given moment. Even at social gatherings—like that group of five or six people by the fireplace, gathered around the low coffee table in the waiting area in the corner of the lobby—people are always attempting to talk to each other plus also look at their phones at the same exact time. It’s an exhausting image to look at, even when you still have your cellphone.

An attractive woman who I vaguely recognized was coming towards me. Not only was this attractive woman attractive, she was also holding not one but two cellphones, one in each of her delicate, attractive hands. This made her, in this moment, a legitimate supernova of attractiveness to me. I waved to her, hopefully. She waved one of the phones at me. Then she whispered the words “I’m on a call,” in my direction. After that, she kept on walking right out the lobby door. I looked at the back of her beautiful head and wished that I could somehow make it explode spectacularly, the same way heads explode in David Cronenberg’s Scanners. Then I looked at the ass. I always look at the ass as a woman is walking away from me, taking in all the necessary details, gathering data for my data banks. I can’t help myself, I guess.

At the front desk a well-groomed Chinese man wearing a black necktie that was approximately the width of a No. 2 pencil asked if he could help me. He had a soft lilt to his voice. I told him about the lost phone and asked if he could check the Marquis’s Lost & Found for me.

He looked at me with a relieved gleam in his eyes. I interpreted the gleam as his way of saying, Thank god it’s you and not me going through this. Front desk agents can be cruel sometimes. He excused himself to “check” the Lost & Found, though I already knew that he was not in the least bit hopeful. He disappeared behind a little door a few feet away from his post at the front desk. I knew the man was only placating me; that the man was doing what he felt like he should be doing, and going through the motions. I wondered again if this entire enterprise was completely futile, and had been futile from the start. I imagined him not checking anything at all back there, not phoning anyone or looking through any boxes. I imagined him standing idly behind the door and counting silently up to thirty.

“Unfortunately…” he said. I didn’t need to listen to the rest of what he was saying to me. Again, his eyes said, You poor, doomed bastard. I despise pity. And the only thing I despise more than pity is melodramatic pity. I despise melodramatic pity so much. I thanked him, but thought to myself, May you, fine sir, endure exactly what I am enduring right now no less than one hundred times during your lifetime. And so it shall be.

*

As the most disconnected man in San Francisco, I continued my pathetic, futile, and apparently doomed journey. I went to a third hotel—the Intercontinental—and the results were the same. It was impossible for me not to think the very worst at this point. The very worst was this:

Maybe I was not well enough to be on a AAA work-trip like this. Maybe my stroke damage was more debilitating than I’d previously thought. Maybe my mind wasn’t even close to being “right.” Maybe it would never really be right again. Maybe I was doomed to consistently lose things for the rest of my life. How was I supposed to hold on to more complicated things like a job, or a significant relationship, or a child if I couldn’t hold on to my cellphone? How?

The answer was this: I couldn’t.

Things got pretty dark for me at this point.

An unfortunate $600 visit to the Apple Store was now officially on my to-do list. Before I could do that, I first had to collect my cameraman back at the Courtyard Marriott on 2nd Street, back where I’d started. I saw the WOODEN CANOE ALE neon sign. The Japanese teenagers were still smoking hungrily outside the tiny cafe. The cowboy vexed by the shit smell was still vexed by the shit smell.

I walked though the front doors of the Courtyard Marriott and saw the front desk looming before me. I figured one more “no” uttered by one more indifferent front-desk agent couldn’t make my day any worse, right? So I asked.

The Courtyard had my phone. And the Courtyard also had my GDC badge. I asked them where they’d found these stray items, and the front-desk guy pointed to the corner on the far side of the lobby. It was, of course, exactly where the flock of foreign stewardesses in their intergalactic-blue uniforms had been standing. I must have set my phone and badge down when I was trying to be charming. Man, what an asshole I was sometimes.

I was suddenly laughing. I instantly felt happy again. Optimism flooded back in and washed over me. Maybe I was OK after all, I thought. Maybe I could hold myself and my life together enough to keep my job. Maybe I’d get the things that I wanted, like a relationship and maybe a family. I started dreaming again, conjuring my middle-aged fantasies.

There was a coffee place literally 10 steps away from the front desk. I asked the agent—begged the agent, really—if I could please buy him and his colleagues a coffee as a way of saying thank-you. “Please. It’s important to me,” I said.

They wouldn’t let me. Maybe there was some sort of Marriott policy against coffee-buying or something. As I turned to go, one of the agents told me that if I really wanted to do something for them, then I could give that coffee money to a homeless person. I agreed.

I’m not in the habit of giving money to homeless people. I lived in New York for 15 years. So many people ask for money in NYC that you learn to tune it out. But on the last day of GDC, as I walked away from my final appointment in the Moscone Center, I spotted a small gathering of homeless sitting in an outdoor area. I had $10 left in my wallet. I took the $10 bill out and handed it to a homeless man.  He didn’t look at me, or acknowledge me. He acted as if getting $10 bills was a regular occurrence for him, which maybe it was, considering all the rich people who inhabit San Francisco these days. He took the bill, almost indifferently. Then he nodded off again. And I turned around and headed for home.