Gary Shteyngart for The New Yorker:
I was obsessed. And I had time to indulge my obsession. I believe that a novelist should write for no more than four hours a day, after which returns truly diminish; this, of course, leaves many hours for idle play and contemplation. Usually, such a schedule results in alcoholism, but sometimes a hobby comes along, especially in middle age. For us so-called W.I.S., or Watch Idiot Savants, all roads led to one Internet site: Hodinkee, the name being a slightly misspelled take on hodinky, the Czech word for “watch.” Hours of my days were now spent refreshing the site, looking at elaborate timepieces surrounded by wrist hair and Brooks Brothers shirt cuffs, and learning an entirely new language and nomenclature. By this point, it was becoming clear that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee. Hodinkee became a natural refuge, a place where I could watch videos of celebrity Watch Idiot Savants talking about their obsession in terms that made me feel less obsessive myself. The rapper Pras, of Fugees fame: “I think about my watches. Like when I get up in the morning.”
This incredibly describes how I feel in the season of life that I’m in. It started with a purchase of a Casio F91-W. Then the obsession began: Casio 158WA-1, Seiko SNK807, Seiko SKX013K, Seiko SARB033, and then a rediscovery of my Casio W800H-1AV that I had purchased years ago and nearly threw away.
In addition to the tracking of time passing, a watch also reminds me of specific moments when I wore that watch, in a way that no other physical object does.