Another slight departure from the normal (abnormal) comedic tone of this page into one of my passions. Not really a passion – more of an obsession; Watches.


From the age of 7 I’ve been interested in watches. I like them because they are things. From the moment I got my very first watch (an Armitron Day’n’Dream watch (I still have it!)) I haven’t been able to fully extricate myself from time.

…what time did I wake up?

… what time did I go to bed?

…how long did it take me to brush my teeth?

…when am I supposed to be in court?

Watches and time have been suffused into the make-up of everything I do. (Why do you think these posts always come out at 5:55am???) And the abstraction of time itself is a constant feature of my wandering mind (much more on this later in later posts.)

R-Cubed:

Around the time I was graduating from college watches took on a new meaning: status symbols. I was interning for a guy who was also a fanatic about watches… but he was much more successful than I was at the time, so his watches were much, much, MUCH nicer. He explained to me that when he sits down at a conference room table with people he doesn’t know, his watch (Swiss), his suit (British) and his shoes (Italian) are subtle indications to his perspective clients that they are in the company of a person who knows the world… someone at their level and capable of understanding where they are on the arc of life.

R^3 (we’ll call him that for now) actually encouraged me to wear watches that represented things I wanted people to know about myself and not to be shy to have a nice watch because it told people things that my resume couldn’t.

Fast forward a decade and a bit and I’m sitting in a conference room with a guy… we’ll call him Mr. Lacrosse. He took a look at the bottom of my resume to find a little blurb about how I collect mechanical watches. “What kind of watch are you wearing today?” (It was a 70’s era, blue/black Seiko Bull-head chronograph). He asked how much I paid for it. (It was $250.00 from an online dealer in Florida.) Yeah – he was not so impressed with what I was depicting about myself. To him it seemed completely frivolous to own a watch so expensive (glad I didn’t wear my Rolex that day!) and proceeded to explain to me that anyone who wore a watch more expensive than his Timex was a show-off and a loser and not to be trusted and never going to work for his company.

R^3 was still right. The watch I wore that day acted like a ‘filter’… it filtered OUT ascetic Mr Lacrosse with his well defined and exclusively self-reinforced world-view. I never could have been happy there; he had no philosophy, he had an opinion. He had no desire expand what he thought, only the authority to surround himself with people who thought like him.

I’m not saying that you need to have an expensive watch or know the difference between a balance wheel and a date wheel to be a friend. Hardly. But if you’re dead-set against them we may not be able to hang.

The Spirit of America!

Here we see one of my so-called “tool” watches. Michael Kobold is a guy who has been fascinated with making watches for the past few decades and had his own spin on the process. He wanted to bring watchmaking BACK to America. The Spirit of America was his tribute to those who fell on 9-11. The markers at 12 o’clock represent the Twin Towers. This watch, the brand and even this model are a perfect metaphor for America itself: parts and processes cobbled together from the four corners of the globe but proudly assembled in (of all places) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

This one was custom ordered: the typical model is manual winding with the winding-crown at 8 o’clock. That really perturbed me so I asked if I could have mine with the crown at 3 o’clock… Ta-dah!

P.S.

My photography sucks (please note the carefully placed lint and how all of the swirlies and scratches on the case of the watch are highlighted). There are folks (I know them) all they do is photograph watches. They are artists. I’m NOT an artist when I use a camera. I’m a GREAT director of photography but when I actually have to ‘shoot’ the images things go terribly wrong. I used to write pieces for an online watch journal… it was a running joke (for me anyway) that I always had to use stock photography because the images I took were bizarre and unusable.

P.P.S.

The center pin of the buckle has a subtle message for Mr Lacrosse. Enjoy you smug, sanctimonious, egotistical (wait wait wait – who are we talking about here??? Him or you???)…. I digress.