I can’t believe I’ve spent more than twenty years obsessing over watches, because the inconvenient truth is this: I’m not actually into watches. They are the last things I want to think about, write about, or discuss with another adult human. And yet—here we are. I’ll admit I’ve allowed watches to hijack my brain more than is healthy, but these hijackings aren’t lifelong commitments. They’re flare-ups. Brain fevers. A condition I’ve come to call Timepiece Malaria.
Timepiece Malaria is a recurrent, feverish fixation that arrives without warning, drains your energy, and leaves you sweating under the illusion that the answer—the answer—is just one more reference number away. It’s not a hobby. It’s not an identity. It’s an illness that behaves episodically, exhausts the host, and then disappears, leaving behind only the desire for shade, silence, and distance. Once the fever breaks, I want nothing to do with watches. Not even a little.
I’m reminded of something the Edge once said about music: he dives deep, burns himself out completely, and then has to get away from it. I understand this instinct perfectly. When the watch fever hits, I plunge like a SCUBA diver hunting abalone—methodical, obsessive, convinced there’s treasure just beyond the next reef. But once I surface, gasping for air, all I want is a pool floaty and a long afternoon of not giving a damn about bezels, calibers, or lume plots.
What I resent most is that trying to understand the obsession only makes it worse. Overthinking watches is like trying to smooth choppy water with your hands. Every attempt at control produces more turbulence. Analysis doesn’t cure the fever; it spikes it. The more I try to “get a handle” on the madness, the more aggressively it grips back.
This is why I sympathize with Werner Herzog’s famously hostile reaction when Terry Gross once asked him if he was in therapy. He bristled at the idea, calling it a kind of intellectual stupidity—a descent into a carnival Fun House of Mirrors. You peer inward and see nothing but distorted fragments: too tall, too short, grotesquely magnified, absurdly shrunken. Therapy, in this view, doesn’t unify the self; it dismembers it. That’s exactly how writing about my watch obsession feels. Every paragraph multiplies me. None of them put me back together.
And yet the evidence is damning. A blog. A YouTube channel. Endless introspection about the very thing I claim to be done with. My left hand insists I’m not into watches. My right hand keeps typing anyway. I say I don’t want to explore the psychology of the obsession, then immediately explore it in public, at length, with footnotes.
I don’t seem to understand this contradiction. I can’t resolve it. I can’t stop it.
Which may be the clearest symptom of all.
Cinemorphosis 
Leave a comment