With all due apologies to Odysseus, David Livingstone and those pretty boys and girls from Oceanic Flight 815, nobody knows lost like I know lost.

However good the directions, however detailed the map, I have always been, and will always be, undirectable. Right at the light, then two blocks mauka, then diamondhead to the on-ramp? You may as well be speaking Old Church Slavonic.

And yet, having so far survived a life of continual misdirection, I feel a sort of pride in just how profoundly and consistently I am able to fall off track. I'm the Cal Ripken of the adrift.

I've gone east instead of west on the Paris Metro, north instead of south on the London Tube. I've spun myself around in a Tanzanian jungle and fallen off course — but thankfully not off the face of the earth — on a Russian glacier. I've gotten perdu in Pralagnon and perduto in Pompeii.

If there is a stigma attached to directionally challenged men, I'm hardly alone. Behind a million stoic masks lie the stricken visages of men disoriented and astray.

On a recent road trip from L.A. to San Francisco to Napa, my buddy Chuck and I managed to take the correct on-ramps 12 percent of the time, exit the proper off-ramps 9 percent of the time and arrive on time at our destination not once.

On our last night, during what should have been a simple 40-minute drive from the Walnut Creek Marriott to my niece's college in Angwin, I overshot the intended exit by, oh, 60 miles. Instead of blithely passing vineyards in twilight Napa, we drove white-knuckled past bars and pawn shops in after-hours Oakland.

We arrived on campus three hours late, with barely enough time to catch a bite with my niece at the nearby IHOP. It took another four hours of wandering to find our way back to our hotel.

Still, as is the case with many chronically impaired, Chuck and I have developed a jovial indifference to our inevitable missteps. We continue to have absolute faith in that most reliable of theorems: If two idiots drive randomly in a finite space for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually crash into the precise place for which they were originally aiming.

For all of the stress it causes others, I can't help but feel a bit of adventure in getting lost. Given the tightly controlled environments in which so many of us live, to have the familiar suddenly become foreign can only be a good thing. Somewhere between those two states is the promise of possibility.

I can't say where exactly, but I know it when I get there.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.