Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • 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.

  • Why a G-Shock Frogman Makes More Sense Than a Mechanical Collection

    Why a G-Shock Frogman Makes More Sense Than a Mechanical Collection

    If you come to me and confess that you’re curious about my watch hobby—intrigued, even—and ask for guidance so you can pursue the passion with the same enthusiasm, I won’t welcome you into the brotherhood.

    I’ll stop you at the door.

    If you are currently free from thoughts of watches, I will advise you to remain free. Walk away. Continue your life as a relatively sane and solvent human being. Because the mechanical watch hobby, viewed without romance or nostalgia, makes less and less sense in the modern world.

    You are paying premium money for obsolete technology in an age that worships useful technology. Why spend six thousand dollars on a Swiss machine that tells you the time when a five-hundred-dollar fitness watch can monitor your heart, track your sleep, detect arrhythmias, and quietly send your vital signs to your doctor before you collapse in a parking lot?

    Mechanical watches don’t make you healthier. They make you sentimental.

    The future is not kind to sentiment. As the world moves away from mechanical timekeeping, competent service will become slower, rarer, and more expensive. Your treasured watch will eventually be packed into a padded box and shipped across the country—or the ocean—where it will sit for months awaiting lubrication, regulation, or a gasket replacement. When it returns scratched, delayed, or mysteriously altered, you’ll enter a corporate complaint system so backlogged it feels less like customer service and more like geological time.

    Meanwhile, the social currency that once justified the expense is quietly evaporating.

    There was a time when a fine mechanical watch signaled professional success. Doctors noticed. Lawyers noticed. Bankers noticed. Today, most people don’t know a Rolex from a Fossil, and many don’t notice watches at all. The design language of luxury horology is becoming a private dialect spoken by a shrinking tribe.

    This is where the collector encounters Analog Futility Syndrome: the slow, uncomfortable realization that enormous resources are being poured into a technology that no longer solves a modern problem. The pleasure remains—but it is shadowed by a faint, persistent question: Why am I doing this?

    Meanwhile, the cultural signaling has inverted.

    Show up wearing a $500 solar-powered G-Shock that works everywhere, never needs service, survives abuse, and keeps atomic time, and people read something entirely different. Efficiency. Practical intelligence. Optimization. The G-Shock wearer looks like a person who solves problems, not one who collects them. The same watch works at the office, on a trail, or on a flight across time zones. It whispers competence. It suggests you might belong to MENSA. Or at least that you don’t spend your evenings arguing about bezel fonts.

    So if you ask me how to become a watch enthusiast, I will not guide you toward Swiss luxury and its Ferrari-like maintenance costs. I will point you toward the solar, radio-controlled, GPS-enabled tools that actually serve a modern life.

    A GPS Master of G Rangeman.
    A radio-controlled square.
    The digital Frogman.

    Real time anywhere. Light weight. Near-zero maintenance. Functional serenity.

    Writing this advice to you has caused something strange to happen to me while composing it. The argument has pointed an accusatory finger toward me. What began as guidance for you has become a prosecution of my imbecilic watch hobby.

    The longer I write, the more irritated I become at my own years of horological excess—years spent chasing mechanical romance while quietly accumulating cost, inconvenience, and low-grade anxiety.

    I may have to sell everything.

    I may have to replace the entire collection with a single indestructible digital watch and walk away.

    You think I’m exaggerating. I am not.

    Writing this has triggered a full-blown Horological Renunciation Fantasy: the emotionally charged vision of liquidating every mechanical piece and replacing them with one maintenance-free instrument—liberation not from watches, but from the psychological gravity of owning too many of them.

    The fantasy is seductive. I can’t imagine being happy right now unless I sell all my mechanicals and replace them with a digital Frogman.

    And that should tell you everything you need to know about the hobby.

  • The High Isn’t the Watch–It’s the Rabbit Hole

    The High Isn’t the Watch–It’s the Rabbit Hole

    One of my favorite pastimes is watching YouTube comparison videos of the Toyota Camry vs. the Honda Accord. I’m not shopping for a car. I don’t need a car. I may never buy another car. 

    But these videos? They soothe the savage beast inside of me. They go down like a smooth bourbon, with notes of ABS braking and a smoky finish of fuel economy.

    While others go to YouTube to meditate or do yoga, I fall into the hypnotic cadence of two grown men comparing rear-seat legroom and infotainment systems with the solemnity of Cold War negotiators. 

    I’m riveted. Parsing the pros and cons of these two sedans gives me a focus so intense it borders on religious ecstasy. I study engine specs like they’re verses from Leviticus. My concentration sharpens, my anxiety fades. I am, for a brief and blissful moment, free.

    And then it hits me: I don’t want the car. I want the focus. The Camry and Accord are just placeholders in the temple of obsession.

    This revelation sheds light on my watch obsession. It helps me realize that acquiring a watch in most cases is a bitter letdown. A $3,000 watch on the wrist is like a Tinder date at Denny’s: out of place and super embarrassing. 

    I’ve worn $5,000 watches while taking my daughters to YogurtLand and I’ve said to myself, “Dude, you’ve lost the plot.”

    How did I get here with expensive watches that I wear when I’m buying pretzels and diet soda at Target?

    And then I realize. The same drive to focus on Camry-Accord comparisons is the same drive that makes me do “timepiece research.”  Watching my fellow timepiece obsessives drool over bezels and lume shots is the real high. That’s what lights me up. That’s what gets the adrenaline surging through my veins. 

    So as watch obsessives, we need to understand that, even more than watches, we are addicted to focus. We are afflicted with Focus Addiction–the true dependency hiding beneath consumer desire: the craving for intense, narrowing concentration that drowns out modern life’s chaos, even if it must be chemically replicated through YouTube reviews and lume shots.

    I’ve spent years confusing consumer acquisition with personal transformation. Getting this thing or that thing will change me inside. I want to be courageous, dignified, courteous, disciplined, fit, and healthy. A watch can’t redeem me. It can’t make me whole. It can’t make me the person I wish I were. Not once have I ever put a new watch on my wrist, gave my wife a wrist shot, and said, “Look, honey, I’ve achieved a metamorphosis.”

    She’ll just look at me and say, “Dude, clean the leaves out of the rain gutters.”

    The material thing in my hands is a letdown because what I really want is the chase and the intense focus. The glorious plunge down a rabbit hole lined with brushed stainless steel and leather-wrapped dashboards. My consumerism isn’t about consumption—it’s about cultivating a state of intense obsession that drowns out the shrieking absurdity of modern life.

    So no more mistaking adrenaline for fulfillment. No more clicking “Buy Now” hoping for transcendence in a shipping box. 

    I’ll keep researching. That’s my Prozac. That’s my monastery. 

    But buying something has proven to be a fool’s errand. And if doing so-called research inflames my consumer appetites, then I should probably put my foot on the brakes when it comes to the research because it can be a prelude to making a purchase I don’t want to make.

    Let me give you an analogy. Let’s say you’re back in high school and you’re at the high school dance, but your girlfriend isn’t there because she’s on a ski trip. While bored at the dance, your ex shows up. She looks more beautiful than you remember her. She approaches you and asks you to dance. “Nothing will happen,” she says. “It will be completely innocent.” You dance with her and something happens. 

    That’s what watch research is like. You tell yourself the research is innocent. You’re just reading forums. Watching a video or two. Maybe checking inventory. 

    But then you wake up and you’re shopping at Target with a $5,000 watch on your wrist and you feel both embarrassed and ashamed.

    Doing research on watches is like having that dance with your ex-girlfriend: Something is going to happen. And it’s not going to be pretty. 

    Have a wonderful day, everyone. Don’t forget to smash that Like button of your soul.

  • How Watch Collectors Lie to Themselves About “Finding Their Style”

    How Watch Collectors Lie to Themselves About “Finding Their Style”

    I recently made a YouTube video arguing that a man should not chase variety in his watch collection but instead find his signature style and whittle his hoard down to a tasteful few. Like a monk with only one robe. Or a chef with one good knife. Or a middle-aged guy who knows that buying yet another GMT won’t fix his marriage.

    Now, did I believe what I was saying? Not entirely. I was, to be honest, talking myself off the ledge. It was a kind of public self-hypnosis: say it enough times on camera, and maybe I’ll stop buying watches I never wear. But I’ll admit—the thought experiment was stimulating, like sniffing ammonia salts just to feel something. Most commenters agreed, saying peace of mind only arrived after purging the herd. But not all. Some insisted that a large, diverse collection brings them genuine joy. Fair. Not everyone needs to live like a horological monk.

    Still, I enjoyed making the video. It felt like intellectual calisthenics for the soul, even if it didn’t convert me.

    One viewer, the formidable “Captain Nolan,” asked a deceptively simple question that demands more than a quick reply:

    “How can you discover your identity without trying watches in every category—divers, pilots, field watches, dress, digital, mechanical, quartz, and so on?”

    By “identity,” he means your taste. What fits your lifestyle, your aesthetic, your internal brand. A fair question. And at first, I answered like a smug adolescent. I said, “You know what you like the same way I knew Raquel Welch was the apex of female beauty when I was nine. One glance. No need to watch Love American Style reruns or thumb through Vogue. Case closed.”

    But that answer is glib. And idiotic. Taste in watches—unlike adolescent lust—is not a hormonal thunderclap. It’s a process.

    So here’s the grown-up answer: yes, you do need to try different styles, just like trying on jackets at Nordstrom. Some are flattering, some make you look like a Bulgarian hitman. It’s tactile. Visceral. And wildly expensive. To really figure out your taste, you may end up spending $5,000 to $10,000 just to land in the right neighborhood. You might call this the Fitting Room Narrative—the idea that trying on a wide range of watches will help you find the “real you.”

    It sounds rational. Comforting, even. But I don’t believe in it.

    The problem is the human brain. It’s not a spreadsheet. It’s a haunted house full of desires, delusions, and marketing fumes. So let me propose a more honest theory: Fever Swamp Accretion–the uncontrolled phase of acquisition in which watches multiply faster than self-awareness. Purpose is retroactively assigned; sanity is postponed.

    Here’s how it works:

    You fall headfirst into the hobby. You start buying watches the way a toddler grabs Halloween candy. You buy microbrand divers, G-Shocks, Speedmasters, and maybe a Rolex or two if your credit limit allows it. You tell yourself each one serves a “purpose.” You start spending a grand a month, easy. Over ten years, you’ve spent more than most people do on therapy. And God knows you need therapy.

    Eventually, the collection metastasizes. Dozens of watches, each one representing a temporary high. You stop wearing half of them. You obsess over straps, bezels, lume. Your identity fuses with your hobby. You’re no longer a man who wears watches; you’re a man being worn by them.

    Then comes the collapse: financial strain, marital tension, the vacant stare of a man wondering why he owns three identical Seikos. Maybe you go through a breakup or foreclosure. Maybe your friends stage an intervention. Maybe your dog leaves you. Think about that. Your watch obsession got so bad your dog abandoned you. 

    You finally tap out. Sell the collection. Keep three. Or two. Or one. You tell yourself you’re “cured.”

    Except… maybe you’re not. Maybe, like Bell’s palsy or a bad ex, the obsession lies dormant. All it takes is one random trigger—a stressful day, a YouTube thumbnail, a flash sale—and you relapse. Buy a Sinn. Then a Squale. Then you’re back in the swamp.

    Why do we cling to the Fitting Room Narrative when it’s so obviously false? Because it has a tidy structure. A clean arc. Beginning, middle, resolution. We’re narrative junkies. We want our Luke Skywalkers to finish Jedi school and never regress. 

    Same with watch collectors. We want the Watch Ninja to overcome his demons and live a Zen life with a single Grand Seiko. If he relapses, we unsubscribe. He becomes a punchline. Another Liver King of horology.

    Still don’t believe me? Consider Pete Rose. In the ‘70s, he was “Charlie Hustle,” the human embodiment of work ethic. But zoom out, and the myth crumbles. Pete wasn’t disciplined—he was compulsive. He gambled, lied, betrayed friends. The man was a walking cautionary tale wrapped in a Cincinnati Reds jersey.

    Or take Sedona. Supposedly a spiritual vortex. In reality, a commercialized fever dream of overpriced crystals, green juice, and pseudo-mystical hokum. You arrive expecting transcendence and leave with a maxed-out credit card and lower back pain from a “chakra realignment.”

    We love myths because they sell. But real life is more complicated. Messier. Less flattering.

    So I could tell you a satisfying tale about finding my “true self” through curating a humble collection of retro divers and minimalist field watches. I could wrap it all up with a bow. But I won’t. Because that would be fiction.

    And honestly, haven’t we had enough of that?

  • 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.

  • Evil With a Vacant Face: The Turpin Case and the Myth That Mental Illness Explains Everything

    Evil With a Vacant Face: The Turpin Case and the Myth That Mental Illness Explains Everything

    I remembered the Turpin case the way most people do: as a headline too grotesque to metabolize. Thirteen siblings chained, starved, beaten, and imprisoned by their parents until one of them finally escaped in 2018 and called the police. I hadn’t revisited the story until I saw an update, The Turpins: A New House of Horrors. In it, Diane Sawyer interviews three of the children who survived their parents’ private dungeon—only to be handed over by social services to another household that abused them all over again. The people who adopted them have since been convicted. The rescue, it turns out, was only a handoff to a new nightmare.

    What struck me immediately was how eerily gothic the parents appear, as if the story had summoned its own visual shorthand for evil. The mother, Louise Turpin, radiates menace—her face tight with cruelty and mental fracture. The father, David Turpin, looks equally arrested, a sixty-year-old man wearing the shaggy hair and slack affect of a disturbed adolescent. Both faces are blank, glum, almost vacant. And yet once you hear what they did—years of systematic starvation, torture, and control—you understand that the vacancy is not emptiness but concealment. Behind those dead expressions worked a tireless, inventive cruelty.

    They are plainly evil people. They also appear mentally ill. Those two facts do not cancel each other out. Narcissism, for instance, is a recognized pathology, but it often carries a moral charge—a pleasure in domination, a delight in harm. Watching the Turpin parents, I was reminded of M. Scott Peck’s The People of the Lie, a book I read decades ago that argued precisely this point: that evil can wear the mask of sickness, and sickness can provide cover for evil. Louise and David Turpin fit that category with chilling precision—malignant narcissists cloaked in religious piety, manipulating their children while feeding off their suffering.

    What makes Sawyer’s interview watchable, even bearable, is what comes after. The children speak about therapy, recovery, work, and the slow construction of a life that does not revolve around fear. Sawyer notes that they “won the hearts of the country,” and it’s true. They are lucid, self-possessed, and deeply sympathetic. You don’t pity them so much as root for them.

    The clearest light in the story is their sanity—and how visibly it flows from their love for one another. These siblings endured the same menace together. They shared it. They protected one another where they could, and afterward, that bond became ballast. They are not just survivors; they are witnesses for one another. Watching them, you come away with a rare conviction that sounds sentimental until you see it embodied: that love, stubborn and mutual, can outlast even prolonged, institutionalized evil. In this case, it appears to have done exactly that.

  • 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.

  • Why I’m Not Really Into Watches (Says the Man Writing About Watches)

    Why I’m Not Really Into Watches (Says the Man Writing About Watches)

    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.

  • 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?