I flew to New York City the first week in March to attend a VR conference at the New Museum on the Bowery. I’d booked a room in an upscale flophouse on 29th Street called the Ace Hotel. The Ace’s Expedia reviews were decent enough. And it was on the east side of midtown, which would make it easier for me to get to CNET, which is also on 29th Street. I had an appointment at CNET later in the week. (This is why.)

The flophouse’s lobby was vast, shadowy, loud. The lobby’s music lunged at me at an ear-bursting volume. The crowd was thick. Everyone in the place looked fashionable and hip. Not the most inviting feeling to walk into this scene, especially after just getting off a plane. I had to shout at the clerk at the front desk. “I HAVE A RESERVATION,” I said, handing him my passport and credit card.

“WHAT?” he said.

“I. HAVE. A RESERVATION.”

Upstairs, the hallways looked less like traditional hallways and more like a kind of hipster version of Shawshank. The rooms even had numbers on them, like prison cells. I was “sentenced” to four nights in room 00847.

I’d learned on Expedia that some of the rooms came equipped with complimentary musical instruments. “My room had a guitar in it!” one of the Expedia reviews exclaimed.

Did I hope that my room had a complimentary instrument? Well, yes. Did my room have a complimentary instrument in it? No, it’s did not. It was a simple, diminutive room with a single dark window that looked out onto a trash-filled air shaft. Typical New York. There was a desk in the room that looked like an architect’s broken-down drafting table. Stretched across the bed was a tartan-print blanket. Next to the bed was a big, classy radio with a knob the size of a donut and tiny, unreadable numbers printed in a circle around the donut/knob. It was already tuned to WFUV, which is really one of the world’s great radio stations. I always sort of love it when I open the door of a hotel room and find a radio playing. I don’t know why I love this so much, but I do. [Note: I phoned the Ace this morning—I sometimes forget how magical it is to call the front desks of hotels in cities 3,000 miles away anytime you like—and was told that the station is actually WNYE, not WFUV. WNYE, unfortunately, doesn’t stream over the ‘Net. Which totally stinks. Anyone, go back to streaming WFUV. It’s wonderful.]

I dropped off my suitcase in my hipster cellblock, then went back to the street to find something to eat.

The city was clear and cold. It streets still seemed to be wincing a bit from the unexpected blizzard a few weeks earlier.

Few know this but New York has a kind of Bermuda Triangle right in the center of Manhattan. It stretches vertically from 24th Street to 32nd Street, and horizontally from Lexington Ave. to 6th Avenue. Wander into this area and you’ll find block after block of ramshackle store fronts all hawking knockoff perfumes and bell-bottom bluejeans.

My hotel was on 29th and 5th Ave.—dead centre of that Bermuda Triangle.

Somewhat miraculously, I found a food place around the corner from the hotel. Standing in line, it was obvious to me that I was the oldest person in the food place by a full 10 years. When did everyone in New York get so young? I whined to myself. Then, more logically, I subsequently whined, When did I get so damn old?

Everyone in the food place seemed to be naive and savvy at once. They wore brightly colored clothes, as if they were all coming from the gym or Burning Man together. They waited in line and stared at their phones, only looking up when it was their turn to order. As soon as they’d ordered, they put their eyes back on their phones. Everyone did this—no kidding.

Somehow the people behind the counter botched my damn order. I wondered if they did this because they knew that I lived in Canada now, and that gentle Canadians do not complain, bitch, or make scenes. They had to start the order over again, which meant that the oldest, most jet-lagged person in the place (me) had to stand at the register and wait patiently as the naive and the savvy filed around me. A few people inadvertently bumped into me, which made me worry that I was invisible in NYC. I tried to stay calm, tried to give myself pep talks. I hadn’t eaten all day. My layover had been in Denver, and I’m always leery of the cost and quality of airport food. But the longer I stood in the food place waiting for my order to be remade, the more I wished that I’d eaten some stale $13 sandwich in Denver.

I was unnerved, thin-skinned, fragile. I felt like I was deteriorating at an alarming rate. I grabbed my remade food order when it was ready, and made haste back to the street.

I figured the worst of it was over. My next priority was to find bottled water. I usually pick up three or four of the biggest bottles of Poland Springs that I can find, and bring them back to my room with me. New York is dense with delis and corner stores and bodegas, usually open 24 hours a day. Yet, for some reason, despite a pattern of ever-widening concentric circles, I could not find a damn deli/corner store/bodega on that night for the life of me. Blame it on the jet-lag, but I became intensely paranoid and wondered if I somehow was walking the sole deli-free path in all of Manhattan.

A wind kicked up, blowing in off the Hudson. It was still winter, still bitter cold. I knew I couldn’t keep this quest up for much longer.

I eventually found a place out by 8th Avenue. The cashier was a young Hispanic guy with a match stick wedged into the corner of his mouth. He could not have looked at me with more indifference in his eyes. He rang up my water bottles by punching a series of seemingly random keys into the register. “$17.50,” he said. Am I getting the old NYC hillbilly treatment? I wondered. Because this was an absurd amount of money for three bottles of water. I told him as much.

“New York prices, man,” the cashier said, shrugging at me in a condescending way.

I briefly considered telling the indifferent cashier that I was, in fact, a proper New Yorker (sort of). And that if anyone knew what “New York prices” were, it was “this guy.” And I’d point my thumb at myself when I said this.

But it was cold outside. And I needed to eat my damn food. And I didn’t want to wander around any longer than I already had. And maybe I did look like a little Canadian now. I hadn’t lived in NYC in seven years. Maybe my New York qualities had faded completely.

I thought, Man, this is all Denver’s fault.

I paid for the water, went back to my cellblock, and gobbled the food like a racoon in a trash can. It was, like all or most things in NYC, pretty satisfying. I got under the tartan blanket on the bed, and fell asleep in the soft yellow light from the radio, listening to the sweet sounds of WNYE.

A bit of a postscript: The next morning I pulled myself together then headed downstairs to look for a coffee. To my great joy, I discovered a Stumptown outpost in the lobby of the Ace. I couldn’t believe my luck: Stumptown is without a doubt one of my favorites.

I picked up an Americano, then stepped out onto 29th Street. Unexpectedly, snow began to fall. Not an urgent, everybody-get-indoors snowfall. No, this was a gentle snow-globe-caliber snow. I held my thin jacket closed at the throat and took a sip of my Americano. The liquid seared the back part of my tongue, then left a vague touch of bitterness in its wake. A cab’s horn rang out, sounding primal, violent. A worker drove a jackhammer into the street a block away. All of it was nearly deafening. I didn’t mind. The snow continued to fall. I took another sip of the hot, bitter coffee, and I felt like something good was going to happen to me that day.