Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • The Man Who Lost His Mind Watching Himself Lose It

    The Man Who Lost His Mind Watching Himself Lose It

    The Man Who Lost His Mind to Watches.

    It’s a good title. It has the faint whiff of Russian absurdism about it—the kind of story Gogol might have written if he’d traded overcoats for dive bezels. And why not lose your mind to watches? In literature, men have unraveled over less. But absurdity only works when it rests on a bedrock of truth. So what truth does this title expose?

    First, let’s dispense with denial. There exists an entire subculture of men who have, in fact, lost their minds to watches. A device whose primary function is to tell the time becomes an object of longing, analysis, acquisition, liquidation, reacquisition, and emotional weather. Madness doesn’t arrive dramatically. It waits patiently in the wings while the enthusiast compares lume, case finishing, and bracelet tolerances.

    Should we be surprised? Not at all. Civilization is a museum of fixation. People lose their minds over limited-edition sneakers, boutique fountain pens, vintage Bordeaux, carbon-fiber bicycles, custom keyboards, Japanese denim, tactical knives, collectible toys, and canvas tote bags that signal the correct cultural tribe. Watches are merely one exhibit in the larger gallery of beautifully engineered distractions.

    As Jim Harrison observed, the danger of civilization is that you will waste your life on nonsense. The watch obsessive understands this perfectly. That’s the problem. He knows the spreadsheets, the forum debates, the late-night listings, and the ritualized buying and selling produce more regret than joy. The clarity is there. The behavior remains.

    And this is where the story turns.

    Because the true obsession is no longer the watches.

    Once awareness enters the room—once the collector recognizes the irrationality of his own pattern—a second, more corrosive fixation takes hold. He begins monitoring himself. Judging himself. Auditing every impulse. Each purchase is followed not just by buyer’s remorse, but by a darker thought: What is wrong with me?

    The watches become secondary. The real object of attention is his own perceived unraveling.

    Shame enters. Then melancholy. Then a low-grade anxiety that hums beneath every browsing session: Am I losing control? Am I wasting my life? Is this what I’ve become?

    At this point, the original title is no longer accurate.

    The man did not lose his mind to watches.

    He lost his mind watching himself lose his mind.

    This is Meta-Obsession Syndrome: the recursive condition in which the collector becomes more consumed by analyzing, fearing, and diagnosing his own obsession than by the objects that started it. The hobby no longer drives the anxiety. Self-surveillance does. The enthusiast becomes both patient and examiner, actor and critic, compulsive buyer and moral prosecutor.

    And here lies the cruel irony.

    The watches may occupy the wrist.
    But the real mechanism now running nonstop is the mind—tracking, measuring, and condemning itself in real time.

    The second obsession is always worse than the first.

  • From Disco Peacock to Tool Watch Puritan

    From Disco Peacock to Tool Watch Puritan

    Let’s stop pretending.
    Society trains you to show off.

    The instinct is ancient, social, and embarrassingly persistent. We preen, we posture, we curate. Most of us never really leave adolescence—we just upgrade the props.

    I know this because I spent decades marinating in a culture of spectacular bad taste.

    In junior high, I came of age during the full fever of the Disco Era. I wore Angel Flight bell bottoms, polyester paisley shirts, puka shells, gold chains, and mesh tank tops that left very little to the imagination and even less to dignity.

    Wardrobe was only the beginning.

    I studied dance the way a law student studies case law. I memorized the moves of Gladys Knight and the Pips’ backup singers. I practiced the Funky Robot. I absorbed choreography from Soul Train like a sponge soaking up hair spray.

    The effort paid off. First place at the Earl Warren Junior High Friday Night Dance Contest.

    Applause, it turns out, is a powerful drug.

    Dancing wasn’t enough. I moved on to Olympic weightlifting and, by thirteen, ranked number one in the nation. But then my mother accidentally bought me Pumping Iron, confusing bodybuilding with weightlifting.

    That book changed everything.

    Why chase numbers when you could chase admiration?

    I pivoted to bodybuilding. By 1981, I was runner-up in Mr. Teenage San Francisco. In high school, I kept dumbbells in my car trunk. Before going into restaurants, I’d do a quick parking-lot pump session, then walk inside with my chest inflated like a parade balloon.

    Any visual gains were usually canceled out by flop sweat.

    Still, the pattern was set: life as performance.

    Fast forward to 2008. A forty-six-year-old man stands in Las Vegas, staring at a massive U-Boat watch.

    Same kid. Same posture. Same need to be seen.

    I might have stayed on Show-Off Road indefinitely, but in 2011—one year into fatherhood of twin girls—something shifted. My wife and I were sitting in a parenting class at a community center. While other parents discussed sleep schedules, I looked down at my 52mm Invicta Subaqua.

    The lume was terrible.

    This detail, which had never bothered me before, suddenly felt like a moral failure. A diver that couldn’t glow? Fraud. Deception. Civilization in decline.

    That irritation metastasized into obsession.

    Within months, I sold all fifty-five Invictas and replaced them with the kings of illumination: Seiko.

    The transformation felt profound. I had moved from oversized spectacle to serious tool watches. No more costume jewelry. No more peacocking. Now I was a man of function. Utility. Purpose.

    I told myself I had matured.

    In reality, I had entered a new phase: Functional Virtue Signaling—using tool watches not just for capability, but as quiet evidence of seriousness, restraint, and anti-flash credibility.

    The performance didn’t end.

    The costume just changed.

    Yes, I was grateful for the transition. Tool watches brought discipline. They rewarded substance over spectacle. But the deeper truth remained: I was still hunting. Still scanning. Still chasing the next piece of steel salvation.

    Addiction had simply traded sequins for lume.

    And yet, a real tool watch does teach one enduring lesson.

    Ostentation is hollow.

    Flash fades. Scale becomes absurd. Attention moves on.

    Function endures.

    For the watch obsessive, a true tool watch is less a status object than a reminder—a quiet lantern in the cave—warning that the urge to impress is the oldest and most expensive disease in the hobby.

  • The Watch Obsessive’s Imaginary Audience

    The Watch Obsessive’s Imaginary Audience

    Every watch obsessive has asked himself the question.

    If I were on television tonight, what would I wear?

    Not what would he say. Not whether he would be interesting, articulate, or memorable.

    No—the real question is the watch.

    Would it be bold or understated? Steel or titanium? Something iconic enough to signal taste, but restrained enough to suggest confidence? Would the case slip cleanly beneath the cuff? Would the host notice? Would the camera catch the glint at just the right angle?

    And most important: would the watch help create the impression—the myth—that this was a man worth watching?

    There is, of course, a problem with this line of thinking.

    He is not going on television.

    No producer is outside his house. No late-night booker is reviewing his résumé. There is no green room. No makeup artist. No segment titled Author and Cultural Commentator Discusses Bezel Alignment.

    And yet the fantasy persists.

    After decades of watching politicians, actors, and financial pundits subtly brandishing their wrists on camera, the association is burned in: television is the natural habitat of the watch. The wrist, after all, was built for close-ups.

    Soon a strange dissatisfaction sets in. Wearing a watch in ordinary life begins to feel incomplete. The object has no audience. No lighting. No narrative context. A diver at the grocery store. A GMT at the dentist. A chronograph while buying paper towels.

    The stage is missing.

    And still, he plans.

    This is Broadcast Readiness Syndrome—the quiet, persistent conviction that one must remain camera-ready at all times, because a moment of sudden visibility might arrive without warning. Today a faculty meeting. Tomorrow: a viral clip. Tonight, obscurity. Tomorrow, perhaps, Colbert.

    He knows this is irrational. He reminds himself daily.

    You are not on television.
     No one is looking.
     Relax.

    The logic changes nothing.

    The watches are still chosen with an imaginary audience in mind. The cuff is still adjusted. The wrist is still rotated, ever so slightly, as if a camera might be hiding near the coffee machine.

    Then comes the dream.

    He is backstage. The suit is perfect. The lights are warm. The host smiles and gestures him toward the chair. The band plays a tasteful sting.

    He sits.

    The conversation begins.

    Halfway through the first answer, he glances down.

    His wrist is bare.

    No watch.

    This is the true nightmare of the watch obsessive—not public embarrassment, not a failed joke, not an awkward interview.

    Exposure without branding.

    And he wakes up, heart racing, already thinking about what he’ll wear tomorrow.

    Just in case.

  • Life Inside the Watch Relapse Cycle

    Life Inside the Watch Relapse Cycle

    For the watch obsessive, the most seductive experience is not the purchase.
    It’s the quiet and the possibility that his addiction is over.

    Every so often, something strange happens. The mind clears. The forums go unread. The YouTube algorithm loses its grip. The collection—miraculously—feels complete. No gaps. No missing category. No late-night searches for “best travel GMT under $5,000.”

    For a few fragile days, he wonders:

    Is this it?
     Am I… cured?
     Is this what normal people feel like?

    This state—call it Horological Remission—can be triggered by real life intruding. A demanding project at work. A family crisis. A trip to Maui where the ocean is more compelling than ceramic bezel technology. Or simple immersion in a good show—say, Fallout, where Walton Goggins and Kyle MacLachlan are busy navigating the apocalypse while, for once, the obsessive is not thinking about lug widths.

    During these rare intervals, he lives like a civilian. He checks the time without evaluating the watch. He moves through the day unaccompanied by reference numbers. He almost forgets that the phrase “micro-adjust clasp” exists.

    Hope appears.

    It never lasts.

    Because the obsession does not disappear. It waits.

    Somewhere in the unconscious lives the Octopus—patient, silent, its tentacles coiled around the deeper circuitry of attention. All it needs is a spark. A visual. A passing image. A drop of lighter fluid.

    Maybe it’s a scene in Homeland. A lean operative checks his watch. The obsessive leans forward.

    That looks like a Mudman.

    Now the cascade begins.

    Model number search.
    Variant comparison.
    Sapphire or mineral?
    Then: Full Metal series.
    Then: silver vs. black.
    Then: forum threads debating coating durability in “real-world tactical conditions,” most of which involve typing at a desk.

    This is Trigger Cascade—the rapid cognitive chain reaction in which a single exposure detonates into hours of research, comparison, and low-grade acquisition planning.

    Meanwhile, Homeland continues.

    The obsessive has no idea what’s happening.

    He cannot explain the plot, the characters, or the geopolitical stakes. But he now possesses a working knowledge of shock resistance standards across three generations of G-Shock metallurgy.

    This condition is known as Narrative Displacement Syndrome: the loss of engagement with the original activity as attention is hijacked by watch research, resulting in the peculiar outcome of knowing the reference number but not the story.

    At some point, awareness returns.

    He looks up from his phone. The episode is over. The room is quiet. Ten browser tabs glow like evidence.

    The Octopus has him again.

    In that moment, he experiences Relapse Lucidity—the painful clarity of recognizing the pattern while continuing to scroll.

    He may even feel cinematic about it. Like Charlton Heston on the beach at the end of Planet of the Apes, shaking his fist at the ruined monument of his attention span.

    You maniacs! You did it!

    Then another thought appears, calm and practical:

    If this is a relapse, should someone be filming me as I do my Charles Heston impersonation? And if that’s the case, should I be wearing the Black Bay… or the Planet Ocean?

    And just like that, the cycle resets.

  • Bracelet Ambivalence Disorder: When Steel Looks Right But Feels Wrong 

    Bracelet Ambivalence Disorder: When Steel Looks Right But Feels Wrong 

    About two years ago, after more than two decades in the watch hobby, I developed a new condition. It arrived quietly, without warning, sometime around 2024.

    I became ambivalent about bracelets.

    I suspect the trouble began with my Seiko SLA055. It came on Seiko’s chocolate-bar rubber—an arrangement I never learned to love. The sliding metal keeper felt cheap, the rubber looked underdressed, and the whole thing struck me as unworthy of a watch north of three thousand dollars.

    So I did what any rational enthusiast would do. I spent over a thousand dollars chasing the perfect strap.

    Most were disappointments. One survived: the FKM Divecore. For a brief moment, peace. Then came the study about FKM and the whispers of “forever chemicals,” and suddenly my sanctuary felt like a toxic waste site.

    Back to the drawing board.

    I finally bought the Seiko bracelet from the SLA077. Four hundred dollars. And I have to admit: it transformed the watch. Steel gave it authority. Gravity. Presence. The same thing happened with my SLA023 and the Tuna SBBN049. On bracelets, these watches don’t just look good—they look heroic. Complete. Like they’ve put on their uniforms.

    So what’s the problem?

    The obvious answers come first. Bracelets are heavier. Links press into the wrist at odd angles. Sizing becomes a seasonal engineering project as weight and weather shift. All true.

    But none of that explains the deeper resistance.

    Because the truth is, this isn’t about comfort. It’s about identity.

    Straps represent something to me: restraint, practicality, anti-bling minimalism. Being “the strap guy” feels like a moral position. Seven watches on rubber feels orderly. Clean. Controlled. And in the strange psychology of collecting, control is another word for happiness.

    Except the mind doesn’t stay controlled for long.

    After months of strap purity, I start craving variety. Maybe one bracelet. Maybe two. A little diversity. A little steel.

    And that’s when the real problem begins.

    The moment a watch goes on a bracelet, it becomes a box queen.

    I tell myself I’m saving it for special occasions. But special occasions turn out to mean a birthday dinner twice a year. Meanwhile, the watch sits in the box, looking magnificent and doing absolutely nothing.

    This morning, after a post-workout nap, I woke up with a plan. Enough of this. I would remove the bracelets from the three offenders and restore order.

    Then I opened the watch box.

    And there they were—those watches on steel—looking perfect. Finished. Complete. Like museum pieces that had finally been framed correctly.

    I couldn’t do it.

    So here I am typing this while wearing my Seiko Uemura SLA051 on an MM300 waffle, fully aware of a simple truth:

    If this watch were on a bracelet, it would still be sitting in the box.

    At this point, I don’t see a solution. I’ve stopped looking for one. This is simply another occupational hazard of the enthusiast’s life.

    I suffer from Bracelet Ambivalence Disorder—the chronic inability to commit to either straps or bracelets, marked by alternating attraction and avoidance. Bracelets are admired. Straps are worn. The heart wants steel. The wrist wants rubber.

    If anyone else suffers from this condition, please make yourself known.

    Misery, like stainless steel, feels lighter when shared.

  • Horological Deconversion: When the Romance Finally Breaks

    Horological Deconversion: When the Romance Finally Breaks

    I recently wrote an essay arguing that pursuing mechanical watches in a digital world is a kind of elegant absurdity—an expensive devotion to obsolete technology while the rest of civilization marches toward sensors, satellites, and software. My proposed remedy was simple and slightly heretical: sell the mechanicals and replace them with an atomic or Bluetooth G-Shock. Accuracy, durability, zero drama. Efficiency instead of romance. Sanity instead of ritual.

    The piece was meant to provoke. Not just readers—me. Writing, after all, is less self-expression than self-interrogation. As Kafka put it, it’s the axe for the frozen sea. Sometimes the ice you crack belongs to your own illusions.

    What began as a tongue-in-cheek thought experiment turned into something less comfortable. It forced me to examine the possibility that my love for mechanical watches isn’t love at all—it’s theology.

    Over the years I refined my taste, sold the excess, and curated a tight collection of mechanical divers. Vintage aesthetic. Tool-watch credibility. A faint whiff of James Bond climbing out of the ocean with a harpoon gun and moral certainty. I told myself this evolution reflected discernment, maturity, identity.

    But the thought experiment raised a harder question: Did I discover my taste—or manufacture it?

    Human beings have a habit of building sacred spaces inside a profane world. Perhaps my watches became sacred cows—objects elevated not because they were necessary, but because I needed something to stand against modern life. Mechanical time as resistance. Analog as virtue. Nostalgia as courage.

    In this story, I cast myself as a quiet rebel.

    But what if the story is fiction?

    What if I’m not resisting anything at all? What if I’ve simply joined a small tribe of aging enthusiasts who reassure each other that spending thousands on obsolete machines is an act of character rather than consumerism?

    At that point, the romance starts to look like cosplay.

    Thousands spent on purchase. Thousands more on service. All to reenact a cinematic memory of youth. The whole enterprise begins to resemble those baseball fantasy camps where middle-aged men pay to take batting practice with retired heroes and pretend, for a weekend, that the dream never ended.

    The thought experiment did something dangerous: it planted a fantasy.

    Sell everything.

    Replace the collection with one or two G-Shocks.

    Start over.

    The appeal isn’t the watch. It’s the psychological reset. The possibility of closing a chapter and reclaiming the mental bandwidth the hobby quietly occupies. Change, after all, is the most intoxicating drug available to a restless mind.

    I’ve felt this kind of impulse before.

    In 2005, after three decades of gym culture, I was standing in an LA Fitness in Torrance, wiping someone else’s sweat off a treadmill while pop music pounded overhead and everyone talked about nothing. The thought hit me with sudden clarity: I need to get out of here.

    Within a week I’d left the gym, bought kettlebells, started power yoga in my garage, and never went back. At the time it felt impulsive. In hindsight, it was alignment—something deep finally overriding inertia.

    I sometimes wonder if watch collectors experience the same internal shift—the moment when accumulation feels less like passion and more like weight. The urge to take a wrecking ball to the collection. To simplify. To breathe.

    This moment has a name: Horological Deconversion—the quiet psychological turn when watches stop looking like identity and start looking like artifacts of habit, mythology, and sunk cost.

    I know someone who went through it. A serious collector. Deeply invested. One day he had the overwhelming urge to sell everything and replace the collection with a $20 Casio F-91W. Eventually he did. He told me the move saved his sanity.

    He still reads the forums. Still watches the madness unfold. But now he’s an observer, not a participant. The zoo is still interesting when you’re no longer inside the cage.

    Anyone who sells their mechanical collection, buys a single indestructible digital, and walks away lighter will have my respect. Not because minimalism is virtuous, but because exits are hard. Leaving a closed system always is.

    There’s something quietly heroic about it—the horological version of a Shawshank escape. Crawl through the tunnel. Emerge on the other side. Stand in the rain and realize the prison was partly self-built.

    And somewhere beyond the walls, there’s a small, durable watch keeping perfect time—and a life of freedom and expanding possibilities.

  • Absolutes and the Ruin of Watch Collecting

    Absolutes and the Ruin of Watch Collecting

    It’s often said that comparison is the mother of misery. No matter how high you climb in any pursuit, there’s always someone perched above you, dangling their boots over the edge. The distance between you and them can feel vast—so vast it erases the climb you already made. In watch collecting, this happens fast. You finally land your grail: a Seiko GMT diver that cost real money, money that made you flinch. You admire it. You feel complete. Then a friend casually flashes a five-thousand-dollar Grand Seiko and—poof—your triumph collapses. You don’t feel lucky. You feel inadequate.

    If comparison is the mother of misery, then she has a meddlesome sister. Call her Aunt Absolute. Aunt Absolute is just as ruinous. She whispers that contentment requires perfection. Not just a great watch, but the right watch. Not just a collection, but the collection. The correct rotation. The correct strap. The correct bracelet. She promises peace once everything clicks into place forever.

    This hunger for absolutes usually rides shotgun with an OCD streak in the hobby. The flaw in that mindset is simple: the hobby refuses to stay still. Tastes change. Knowledge deepens. Bodies age. Jobs shift. Moods fluctuate. Absolutes hate variables, and watch collecting is nothing but variables. To the absolutist, change feels like threat, and threat breeds anxiety. In its ugliest form, that anxiety convinces you your collection is one wrong move away from collapse. Sell a watch. Swap a strap. Wear a bracelet again. The whole thing topples. This is Jenga Anxiety—the chronic fear that a single adjustment will destabilize not just your watches, but the identity you’ve built around them. Adaptability feels like fragility. Experimentation feels like self-destruction.

    I lived under Aunt Absolute’s roof for about two years. I refused bracelets entirely. Every watch sat on Divecore FKM straps. The system was clean. The rules were rigid. I was happy—until the FKM “forever chemical” scare cracked the foundation. I reassessed. I adjusted. Now four watches live on straps and four on bracelets. The collection breathes. I have options. And yes, I forgot how good a bracelet can feel until I let myself enjoy one again.

    That experiment proved something important. I didn’t need absolutes to enjoy the hobby. I didn’t need perfection. Flexibility wasn’t failure—it was freedom. The watches didn’t lose meaning when the rules softened. They gained it.

    Will I stay flexible, or will I drift back toward absolutism? History suggests vigilance is required. But if I feel Aunt Absolute tugging at my sleeve again, I’ll remind myself of a simple truth: absolutism is the aunt of misery.

  • Buy Now, Regret Later: How Ancient Instincts Ruined Modern Shopping

    Buy Now, Regret Later: How Ancient Instincts Ruined Modern Shopping

    In the early 1990s, I saw comedian Rob Becker perform Defending the Caveman in San Francisco—a one-man anthropology class disguised as stand-up. His central thesis, stitched together from kitchen-table spats with his wife, was that men are hunters, women are gatherers, and this prehistoric wiring still runs our modern relationships like a bad operating system.

    His proof? Shopping.

    For the gatherer, shopping is a leisurely daydream. Wandering the mall for six hours and imagining buying things she can’t afford is an enriching sensory experience—like spiritual window-shopping. For the hunter, shopping is a surgical strike. He wants pants. He buys pants. He leaves. The suggestion to “just browse” makes his eye twitch.

    “Let’s get the hell out of here,” says the man. He has completed his mission. He has felled the beast.

    That moment—man as single-focus, tunnel-visioned, goal-oriented predator—explains a great deal about the pathology of watch addiction. We are still cavemen, just hairier and worse at squatting. And we don’t hunt food anymore. We hunt wristwear.

    We see a watch online and a brontosaurus steak lights up in our brain. Locked in. Target acquired. Our dopamine circuits spark like faulty Christmas lights. We must have it. There is no tranquility, no peace, until the object is in our possession.

    The problem? Our primitive instincts weren’t designed for the digital age. Back then, acquiring a new object meant trekking through wilderness, battling saber-toothed tigers, and earning your meal. Today, it’s clicking a “Buy Now” button while half-watching a YouTube review at your ergonomic standing desk, surrounded by a sea of unopened Amazon boxes. Intoxicated by online shopping platforms, we are overcome with the Horological Hunt Reflex–the involuntary lock-on response triggered by spotting a desirable watch. Once activated, attention narrows, patience evaporates, and the collector cannot rest until the object is captured—regardless of need, cost, or logic.

    Our brains still think we’re walking 40 miles to spear a mammoth. In reality, we’re reclining in office chairs with lumbar support, ordering $2,000 divers like they’re takeout sushi. The hunt requires no sacrifice, no sweat, no real effort. And so it never satisfies.

    This caveman instinct affects our watch hobby. We get the watch. We admire it. We post a photo to Instagram. Then—we twitch. We fidget. Our brain says, “Good job. Now go get another.”

    We are not content in the cave. Evolution didn’t design us for stillness. It designed us to be hungry. To prepare. To hoard. So we keep hunting. And the cave fills with stainless steel trophies until the glint attracts low-flying pterodactyls that dive-bomb us in our sleep and try to pluck the Omega off our wrist.

    We are maladapted creatures. Our eyeballs evolved for survival. Now they doom us. We were built to scan the horizon for danger. Now we scan Hodinkee, Instagram, Reddit, eBay, WatchRecon, and Chrono24 until our dopamine is a wrung-out dishrag and our bank account is an obituary.

    We’re trapped in a glitch—stone-age instincts, 5G bandwidth. Our visual fixation, once essential to survival, now chains us to a cycle of desire and regret. Thousands of watches flood our screens in a single hour, and our brains are too old and too soft to resist. The only real solution is exile. But exile from what? Our jobs, our networks, our entire digital lives?

    There is no cave to retreat to. Just another tab open.

  • The Greatest Book My Father Never Wrote

    The Greatest Book My Father Never Wrote

    Last night I dreamed I was summoned to a publisher’s office, the kind that smells faintly of dust, old paper, and deferred hope. I sat across from a man in his early sixties wearing a beige suit so aggressively neutral it seemed designed to disappear into the shelves behind him. Those shelves were packed tight with books—the visual shorthand for authority, legitimacy, and the life I was supposed to have lived.

    He told me, calmly, as if delivering weather updates, that my father had written a perennial classic. A bestseller. A semi-autobiographical novel about growing up poor, raising me with my teenage mother in the Gainesville projects. The book, he said, was written with mordant wit and bruised humor and was routinely compared to Huckleberry Finn.

    Then he handed me a copy.

    I opened it and recognized everything immediately: Flavet Villages, the roach-infested housing complex for veterans and struggling students, where poverty clung to the walls like nicotine. The prose was first-person present tense—close, intimate, relentless. I said this out loud, the way you do in dreams when you want credit for noticing things. The publisher nodded, pleased.

    “Have you ever thought about doing something like this?” he asked. “Following in your father’s footsteps?”

    I shook my head. Then I asked the only question that mattered: “How come I never heard about this book before?”

    “Oh, it doesn’t exist here,” he said, waving the concern away. “It exists in a parallel universe in a faraway galaxy.”

    Naturally.

    At this point, he reached into his desk and handed me a gray carbon radio shaped like a pyramid—part Cold War relic, part sci-fi prop. It had a special shortwave frequency that could lock onto that distant planet, where my father’s novel was being read aloud, endlessly, by a space alien. Anytime I wanted, I could tune in and listen. It would comfort me, he said, as if this explained everything.

    I thanked him, left the office, and met my wife and twin daughters at the San Francisco Zoo. While they stared at zebras with the earnest fascination of people grounded in reality, I extended the antenna and tuned the dial. The alien’s voice crackled through—steady, patient, reverent—reading my father’s great novel for the thousandth time.

    My family looked at me like I’d finally tipped over into madness. I didn’t care.

    I was listening to the greatest book my father never wrote, being read forever in a universe where it mattered. And for once, that was enough.

  • When Loving Watches Starts to Feel Like a Job

    When Loving Watches Starts to Feel Like a Job

    In her darkly hilarious comedy special Father, Atsuko Okatsuka shares the origin story of her career in punchlines. Her schizophrenic mother once “kidnapped” her in Japan and whisked her away to the United States without warning, severing her ties to her father in the process. The trauma was so disorienting, so profound, that Atsuko now mines laughter for survival. She tells us, with a comedian’s grin and a survivor’s twitch, that she performs to fill an infinite hole in her soul with the validation of strangers.

    That hole is not unique to her. It’s a universal pit—bottomless and demanding. Validation comes in many flavors. For some, it’s esteem and admiration. For others, it’s expertise, artistry, the warm glow of audience approval. For Atsuko, it’s laughter. For others, it’s the faint buzz of a “like” on a post about a wristwatch.

    Let us now consider the watch obsessive, a different breed of relevance-seeker, but a kindred spirit nonetheless. He isn’t doing five-minute sets at the Laugh Factory, but he is performing—on Instagram, on forums, on YouTube, in the comment sections of strangers’ macro shots. He presents his taste, his “knowledge,” his ever-shifting collection. But underneath the sapphire crystals and brushed titanium is the same primal whisper:
    Do I still matter?
     Do they still see me?

    Here’s the tragic twist: he may already have the perfect collection. It gives him joy. It’s balanced. It fits in a single watch box. By all logic, he should stop. Buying another watch would be like adding a fifth leg to a table—wobbly and unnecessary. But he doesn’t stop. He can’t stop.

    Why? Because if he stops collecting, he stops posting. If he stops posting, he stops being seen. And in a world addicted to scrolling, disappearing feels like dying.

    Relevance is the new oxygen. And social media is a machine that runs on novelty, not legacy. The digital hive forgets fast. “Gangnam Style” is now a fossil. “Call Me Maybe” is background noise at the grocery store. To stay visible, you must be new. You must be shiny. You must offer dopamine.

    And what happens when the watch addict manages his demons, reaches peace, and stops feeding the machine?

    He becomes boring. He becomes silent. He becomes irrelevant.

    And the parasocial bonds he once had—those illusory friendships, those mutual obsessions—fade. The sense of exile is real. It doesn’t matter that the exile is self-imposed. The pain still lingers.

    That fear—that primordial fear of irrelevance, of being cast out from the tribe—can be so powerful it masquerades as passion. It convinces the watch obsessive to keep flipping, keep chasing, keep posting. Not out of love, but out of fear.

    In this crazed state, the obsessive has succumbed to Performative Collecting–the transformation of a private pleasure into a public act staged for recognition. Watches are curated less for personal resonance than for their ability to sustain audience attention. Silence is interpreted as failure.

    So the question becomes: Are we collectors? Or are we hostages? Do we love horology? Or are we simply terrified of vanishing?