Last night I dreamed that a group of YouTubers who specialize in watches met at a museum where actors performed live reenactments of world history as a kind of Cirque du Soleil extravaganza. Empires rose and fell while acrobats dangled from the ceiling. Afterward, we gathered in the museum café to discuss the performance.
No one admitted it, but we were all dead to watches.
We weren’t ashamed of this, nor were we particularly proud. We simply didn’t know how to talk about it. These were people who had spent years discussing bezels, lume, movements, finishing, wrist presence, heritage, and the spiritual significance of shaving two millimeters off a case diameter. Now none of us cared. A watch was a watch. It told the time. Apparently, this had been its function all along.
We had moved on.
Oddly, nobody seemed sad or relieved. We were more like patients in convalescence, sitting around after surviving the same peculiar disease. The watch obsession had taken something out of us. Years of acquisition, research, comparison, anticipation, unboxing, disappointment, resale, and reacquisition had finally exhausted the machinery of desire. We had spent years looking for the watch that would end the search, only to discover that the search ended when we stopped caring about watches.
After commiserating about the museum performance, we went our separate ways.
Then my wife called. She needed a half gallon of milk.
I stopped at a store, but buying milk turned out to be more complicated than I remembered. Apparently, you now had to try on the carton the way you would try on shoes.
“Do you have this in a thirteen double-wide?” I asked the clerk.
She checked. “Only thirteen regular.”
I took off my shoe and inserted my sock-covered foot into the milk carton. Milk swished around my ankle.
“Too tight,” I said.
She told me she would look in the back for a wider model.
Only then did the obvious problem occur to me. Hadn’t I just ruined the milk? How could they possibly put this carton back on the shelf after I had stuck my foot into it?
The clerk, a blonde college student who looked about twenty, seemed puzzled by my concern.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It happens all the time.”
I told her to forget about the double-wide. I would buy the milk anyway.
I drove home with my half gallon, hoping no one would notice that I hadn’t tried it on.
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