It’s been a minute. Actually, it’s been nine months since I published anything here. Last April, I took a job as an editor of watch content at a magazine, a job with a 5th-avenue Manhattan office and an exclusivity clause that effectively shut down Beyond The Dial. At first I was kind of relieved. It was a fresh start with a new audience. I felt I was going in circles here at BTD, though to be fair the whole point of this publication was to allow us to go in circles, to orbit an idea until the stars aligned or didn’t align, to essay, which is French for try. I didn’t get to do much of that at the job I took. I missed just trying.
I also missed writing about affordable watches. The publication I was with doesn’t cover much below $10k or thereabouts. Covering the expensive stuff excluded my favorites: small dive watches that glow in the dark. Barring relatively rare vintage divers (that no longer glow in the dark), I’ve tried to come up with a small dive watch (without diamonds) over $10k. I suppose there are a couple Blancpain reissues at 38mm (maybe they’re limited editions, too), but I can’t think of any others. If you want a great small diver (say 38mm and down), you’re going to have to spend a lot less than $10k. I really hadn’t noticed that before.
But I got used to the expensive stuff. I immersed myself in it. I did my job, and for a while it changed how I thought about watches. To say that my tastes changed while immersed in the expensive stuff would be wrong; what changed were my priorities. If anything, my tastes remained stubbornly in place, but a shift in priorities saw me defying my tastes. I began to buy some amazing watches, but I didn’t love them.
While I was away from BTD, I acquired two neo-vintage Rolex Subs. One is a two-tone 16803 from 1984 I got in a bizarre cash deal. It doesn’t glow, as the tritium has burnt through it’s half life a couple times. 1984 was the first year of the two-tone Sub, so eventually this will be a significant watch for collectors. The other Rolex Sub is a perfectly ghosted 16800 from 1981, making it a “transitional Sub” with a sapphire crystal and the quick-set date, but the old-school matte dial of the earlier 1680s. As my colleague, friend and well-known Sub-fanatic Greg Bredosian says, “That’s peak Sub right there.”
I don’t love these Rolex Subs. I think they’re both amazing watches bought somewhat wisely at the nadir of their journey from neo-vintage to vintage, and both are references that will come to be seen as emblematic of their Regan-era moment. That’s smart collecting, but I have failed to find a real connection with either of these Submariners. Why?
The ghosted sub is really spectacular, but I don’t like gray and light blue. I knew I didn’t like gray and light blue. I’ve never liked gray or light blue. When I took LSD in highschool, gray and light blue things became demons. James Lamdin of Analog Shift examined the dial of my Rolex 16800 with a loupe and said, “It’s fucking perfect.” It is fucking perfect, but I don’t really like looking down at it on my wrist.
The two-tone Sub is more my jam. I like yellow gold a lot, and I got past my Wolf-of-Wall-Street aversion to two-tone pretty quickly. But I don’t really like bracelets, and wearing a two-tone Submariner without the bracelet is like playing an electric guitar acoustically: you’re missing the whole point.
Assessing Keepers
The daily exposure to expensive watches during my the other gig normalized me to that price category; in fact it made these Rolex Submariners seem cheap. Relatively speaking, they were good deals. I bought the 16800 at auction from Phillips Hong Kong, and it was one of the lowest lots to close that day. The cash-deal two-tone Rolex Submariner 16803 was kind of a steal for what it is. Still, I felt a little odd buying these Subs. As John Fogherty once sang, “I ain’t no senator’s son. It ain’t me.”
Short version: the two Rolex Subs are not keepers. As I realized this, I started to wonder what a keeper was. Did I even own a keeper? I mean, sure, I wrote about a keeper at Hodinkee, my little Vacheron Constantin dress watch that replaced the amazing but poorly chosen Grand Seiko 50th birthday watch. I know what a keeper looks like: it’s platinum, made in 1990, has fancy lugs, a stepped case, weirdly legible Arabic numerals and a caliber K.1014 hand-winding movement that is thin and precise and winds as loudly as a clock.
I am, it turns out, a deeply monogamous man. I bought three other Vacheron Constantin dress watches, and they’re amazing “examples.” But they ultimately detracted from my love for the platinum birthday watch. I get antsy when I have too much choice. There is psychological research that explains this, but none of that research speaks to what I think motivates my monogamy: for me it’s because I want to enter a symbiotic relationship with my stuff, because I want to blur the line between me and the material world. When that line blurs, I am just a little closer to achieving whatever the opposite of alienation is. God knows we need more of that these days.
The other three Vacheron Constantins are excellent “examples,” but they are not keepers. They’re getting in the way of me merging with my platinum birthday Vacheron. This is hard for me, but I think I may let them go.
The Two-Watch Collection
I can’t get that platinum Vacheron wet, and so I need a sports watch. Maybe that makes me binogamous (that’s got to be a thing by now). So a two-watch collection, then. When I landed my new job, I rewarded myself with a Seiko SJE093, which is the closest thing to an exact replica of the original Seiko 62MAS ever made. It was a consciously defiant move, buying a Seiko to enter a world that did not stoop to Seiko’s level. Buying this Seiko felt like running a string through a labyrinth, a way back home if I needed it, and sometimes I did.
People complain about the price of $3500, and sure that’s a lot for a Seiko diver, or it used to be, because man they’re expensive now. People complain about the movement in the SJE093, and I think they’re just bitching to bitch. Mine runs within two seconds a day.
The Seiko also ticks all the boxes: it’s waterproof, it’s got hardened steel and a ceramic bezel insert, it’s precise, it’s a perfect 37mm, it’s finished as well as a Grand Seiko, it’s got the brightest and longest-lasting lume of any watch I’ve ever owned, it’s handsome as hell, it has a great history, it’s the original Seiko diver of 1960, and it looks awesome on me.
But I don’t care about ticked boxes. If I’m going to own one sports watch, it has to make me feel as good and happy and relieved and comforted and stoked as my Timex Boy’s Diver did back in 1977. Man, I own a lot of dive watches right now, and not a single one of them gives me the warm-fuzzies like this 62MAS.
The Rolex Subs distracted me from the 62MAS reissue. The budding Vacheron collection distracted me from the platinum Vacheron. I’m a binogamous man. There’s nothing I can do about it. My brain likes less, not more. My heart longs for a lasting relationship. I love simplicity and the easy daily decisions that come with it.
I have two dogs. One is a boy named Moose, and the other is a girl named Coco. Moose scratches that itch for a man to own a male dog, the proverbial good boy. Coco brings out that softer side of me, the side that crosses his legs like a woman and prefers to feel skinny and not buff. Obviously Moose is the Seiko and Coco is the platinum Vacheron in this knuckle-headed analogy, but I bring it up because the reason we got a second dog is so that they could play together. And so I’ve found that the two-watch collection is all about how the two play together, how they compliment each other, and it’s also about the warm-fuzzies they generate as a pair. You really should see Moose and Coco snuggle.
I’m not going to try to figure out why these two watches work for me, or why they seem to work so well together. They just do. Screw the checklist of required specs; it should be a given that a watch will do what you need it to do. It’s the next question about the warm-fuzzies that’s going to tell you if that’s going to be your watch or someone else’s watch. Using that criteria, it turns out that I am letting some serious collector’s pieces go in favor of a modern Seiko reissue and a 1990 Vacheron. Who knew those would be my priorities once I ignored received dogma and realigned with my taste?
I do also want to point out that if Rolex put out an exact replica of the original Submariner Ref. 1604 from 1954, people would freak the hell out and I’d probably bend over backwards to get one. Rolex won’t do it (and Tudor’s reissues don’t really thrill me). But that’s exactly what Seiko did with the SJE093, a pretty-much perfect modern replica, and I got one of them, and I adore it. Some watches were just sorted out upon release, you know? The 62MAS was one of them. They could have asked for twice as much for this reissue and I’d probably have found an excuse.
Oh, and I needed a beater, so I took my SKX013 back from my partner after like ten years and threw an orange Tropic strap on it and it’s perfect for chopping wood or testing the seals in the sauna or playing racquetball. But on most days I’m wearing the Seiko 62MAS and not really thinking that much about my watches. But I am bonding with them in that symbiotic way that feels like the opposite of alienation. Let’s call it spiritual materialism. I’m super into it.