I had one of those existential moments of crisis when I left the house this morning. As I was about a block away from my house, I shifted in my seat and had a feeling like there was a part of me missing. After one of those moments of self-evaluation that I’ve been known to have, I realized that I had left home without my cell phone.

If you’ve been in the same situation as me before, you probably know the same instantaneous rush of panic I went through and what words I said out loud upon my realization (hint: sounds like “SON OF A BITCH!!”). No cell phone? How was I going to function? What if someone wanted to call me? If there was an emergency, they’d have to reach me by calling my office number and be patched through to my personal line, which could take upwards of thirty seconds. And even worse, if I was in my car, I’d be completely unreachable, except by road flares or possibly smoke signals. How are people going to call me if I don’t have anything for them to call?

There used to be a time in my life when I could leave the house without a telephone strapped to my hip and not feel like I was taking my life into my hands. I used to be able to go for long periods of time every day out of the range of a telephone, confident in the knowledge that no one wanted to call me anyway. But no longer. Now I need to have my cell phone with me at all hours of the day despite the fact that, still, nobody wants to ever call me.

But it’s not just my desperate desire to make a connection with a cold, uncaring world that requires me to carry around my cellular device. I also need it for the camera, on the off chance that I run into Bigfoot on my way to work and I want to take poorly lit, low contrast photos of him. I also need it for the GPS locater device that Verizon Wireless was kindly enough to include within the phone’s internal mechanisms without my prior approval. Because there always remains the chance that I may be abducted by aliens, and I want my loved ones to be able to track my progress out amongst the stars as I travel from universe to universe. Also, I may someday snap and go on a killing spree, and it would be nice if the authorities could track me down before I had the chance to kill again.

But as I sat in my moving car, one block removed from my house, phone-less, camera-less, CIA tracking chip-less, I was forced to make a choice of turning back, getting out of my car and back into the cold to walk into my house, find my phone’s hiding place by calling it from my home phone, get back into the car and resume my drive to work, or I could throw caution to the wind and say to hell with it, continue driving and live dangerously for once in my life. So for the first time ever, I decided to be a man and went to work today without my cell phone.

And that’s why I missed your call this morning, Scarlett Johansson. My apologies.