I wrote a whole article about how to pack a watch box for a cruise. Five watches, seven nights, each one assigned a role I had reasoned my way into before the ship left port. It was good advice. I stand behind every word of the framework.

Then I went on the cruise.

Here is what the wrist time actually said, which turned out to be a different conversation than the one I planned.

The Five, Reconsidered

The Oceaneva Deep Marine Explorer II in Damascus and White did all the work.

I packed it as the party watch. The Glow Party was night seven, white was the move, and I had a watch with a white enamel dial and a white rubber strap waiting for exactly that moment. We never made it. I was on a hot streak in the casino and chose the table over the dance floor, which is a story for another article, and the themed night the watch was named for came and went without us.

It did not matter, because the watch had already justified the trip. It climbed Dunn’s River Falls. It sat poolside at the private island. It went into the ship’s hot tub and came to the weight room. It became the piece I reached for without thinking, every wet and active hour of the week. The FKM strap and the dive rating did exactly what they were built to do, and I had filed them under decoration for a party we skipped. The watch I packed for one night I never attended earned the entire week instead.

The Oceaneva Deep Marine Explorer II in Navy got one good compliment and a quiet retirement.

This was supposed to be the every day watch. What it actually got was a strong opening night and almost nothing after. One of the sales associates in the ship’s watch shop complimented it the first evening, which is the kind of endorsement that means something coming from a person who stares at watches for a living. Then I barely wore it again. The Damascus and White had taken over the role I assigned the Navy, and two dive watches in a five-watch bag is one dive watch too many. I did put the Navy back on for the last morning, breakfast and the long way home, which felt right. A watch that bookends a trip without filling its middle is still a watch that was there for the parts that mattered.

The Armand Nicolet was the one the watch people noticed.

There are always watch people on a ship if you know how to spot them, and they found the Armand Nicolet. That dial is hard to miss. It really pops, the acqua surfacing and receding depending on where the light comes from, and it pulled more unprompted conversation than anything else on my wrist. It earned its place in the bag through the talking rather than the timekeeping, which is its own kind of utility. A watch that starts conversations with strangers who care about watches is doing work the spec sheet does not list.

The Mido was almost too dressy for a trip that had no formal nights.

I bought the Baroncelli for formal dining rooms, and then it turned out there were no formal nights to speak of, at least not the way I had pictured them. What there was instead was The Hudson, the main dining room, where I wore the Mido twice with outfits built to match it. It delivered exactly the formality I asked of it, which on this particular family cruise was a touch more than the room strictly required. It still looked correct. It still drew compliments. It just taught me that the gap between dress and overdress is real, and that a ship’s idea of dressed up is calibrated differently than a Swiss boutique’s. Right watch, half a notch high, worn anyway and worn well.

The Citizen GPS read poorly, but it set easily.

The timezone watch was supposed to be the effortless one. Find a satellite, set itself, always know the local hour. In practice the automatic satellite lock was slower and less reliable than the pitch promised, and I ended up setting the timezone by hand for two of the four ports. To its real credit, the manual change was effortless, one click of the crown to push the hour forward or back, the easiest manual time zone adjustment I have used on any watch. The bigger problem was legibility. The dial and the hands share too much of the same color, and the contrast a watch needs to be glanceable at a dinner table simply was not there. It solved the problem it was bought for, mostly, while making me work to read the answer. A real limitation, named honestly, because the article that sold you on a watch should be the article that corrects the record.

The automatics ran down, and there was no good fix.

Here is the practical failure nobody plans for. I packed four automatics across the five slots, and you cannot wear four automatics at once. The ones that sat got no motion, and a watch that gets no motion winds down. I spent more of the trip resetting time and date on stopped watches than I expected to. I even went looking for a solution mid-trip, a travel watch winder that could keep four pieces running, and discovered that nothing like that exists in a travel package. Single and double travel winders are everywhere. A four-watch travel winder is apparently a problem the market has decided not to solve. So the automatics stopped, and I wound them, and stopped them again by not wearing them. Five automatics in a bag is four stopped watches and one running one, at any given moment.

The Ship Was a Watch Store I Did Not See Coming

I knew there would be a watch shop aboard. I did not know it would hold literally thousands of watches, an authorized dealer for Tissot, Hamilton, Longines, TAG Heuer, Oris, Breitling, Citizen, Bulova, and Invicta, with a sizable case of pre-owned Rolex on top of all of it. This was not a gift shop with a watch counter. This was a genuine retail operation floating in the Caribbean, and I spent more time in it than I will admit to Chrissy in writing.

Which is how the trip acquired two watches I did not plan for.

The Two I Did Not Plan

The one I won.

Fifty-two millimeters of transparent red plastic. A plastic dial under mineral crystal. A digital movement out of China. A polyurethane strap. The Invicta Racing Burnout Digital retails for fifty dollars, and I did not pay even that, because I won it in a raffle aboard the ship. It is, by every rule I have ever written down, exactly the kind of watch this collection exists to exclude. Battery quartz. No provenance. No research. No filter. Zero intentionality. It arrived by pure chance, the way a door prize arrives, with no story except the one it landed in.

The one she picked.

Chrissy chose the Breitling. I want to say that first, because it is the part that matters most and the part the standalone article is going to be about. The Superocean Heritage, rose gold and steel, blue dial, blue rubber strap, the B31 manufacture movement, two hundred meters of water resistance, picked up off the counter and handed to me by the person I was on the trip with. I could not say no. Not to the watch, and not to her. Duty free crossed the final T, the discount that turned a someday watch into a this-week watch.

There is a longer story here, about the watch I actually walked in to see, about how the Superocean was not even the Breitling I had been considering, about what it means that the most serious watch I own is the one piece my own filter did not choose. That story deserves its own room, and it is coming. For now it is enough to say the Superocean belongs, fully and without tension, and that it will always be this trip. The Norwegian Prima, my parents aboard, the twins newly graduated, Chrissy beside me. I will look at that blue dial forever and see June 2026. The provenance is the point. The watch is the door, and the room it opens is that week.

Later, in the lobby of the Prima Theater, a gentleman noticed the Breitling on my wrist and remarked that it was a really nice raffle gift. I laughed and told him the truth, that the fifty dollar Invicta was the raffle prize and I had bought the Breitling myself. We both had a good laugh about it. He was not wrong to be confused. On this trip, the watches arrived in exactly the reverse of the order the prices suggest.

What I Would Change

Hindsight is the whole reason to write one of these. Here is what the next bag looks like, corrected by the one that actually sailed. I am already thinking about it for the Margaritaville Beachcomber in April.

Fewer automatics. This is the big one. Four automatics in a five-watch bag meant a rotating cast of stopped watches and a lot of wasted setting. Two automatics maximum, and the rest light-powered or quartz, anything that holds its time sitting still. The grab-and-go category I have softened on for years is exactly the category a cruise rewards, because a watch that is right the moment you pick it up is worth more on a trip than a movement story you have to rewind. A Citizen Corso, black dial, luminous hands and markers, Eco-Drive so it never stops, leather strap, around three hundred and forty dollars, is precisely the kind of legible light-powered piece this bag was missing.

Straps, not bracelets. I did not expect this one. Between the walking, the water, and the drinking, my wrists swelled more than they do at home, and the metal bracelets stopped being comfortable by mid-afternoon. The FKM strap on the Oceaneva and the rubber on the Breitling, meanwhile, were perfect, forgiving when my wrist was at its largest and never once a problem. For April the rule is straps over bracelets, full stop. A swollen wrist on day four does not care how nice the bracelet looked on day one.

One dive watch, not two. The Navy and the Damascus and White did the same job, and only one of them needed to be there. The Damascus and White won on the strap and the versatility. Next time the Navy stays home and the slot it would have taken goes to something that fills a different need entirely.

A legible travel watch beats a clever one. The Citizen GPS was a neat trick that read poorly all of the time, even though it set easily by hand. For the next cruise the priority flips. I would rather have a watch I can read instantly at a dinner table than a watch that promises to set itself and then makes me squint to confirm it did. Legibility is the feature. Everything else is garnish.

The winder problem has a partial answer. Nobody makes a true four-watch travel winder, but there are compact units, like the small FRUCASE travel winders, that are not perfect and not built for four, yet are small enough to actually pack. Not a real fix. A hedge. The better answer is still the first one, pack watches that do not need a winder, but if I insist on bringing automatics that will sit, a compact winder is at least a thing that exists. The bag mostly solves the winder problem by not creating it.

Plan for the ship’s watch shop. I walked into a floating authorized dealer with no plan and no budget line for it, and I walked out having bought a Breitling I love. That worked out. It worked out because the Breitling was already on my roadmap and the occasion was real, not because walking in unprepared is a strategy. Next time I go aboard knowing what I would say yes to and what I would not, because a duty-free watch counter in the middle of the ocean is a very persuasive room.

What the Framework Was Actually For

I built this collection on rules. Non-plastic movements, the honest mechanical stuff, automatics and manual winds, no battery quartz on the roadmap. In-house manufacture. One per brand. An ascending path with a Patek at the far end of it. The rules are real and I am not abandoning them, because they did exactly what they were supposed to do.

But the cruise complicated the story, and I want to be careful about how I say this, because there is an easy version that is a lie.

The easy version says the rules were never the point, that underneath every filter was a single secret question, does this watch hold something true, and that both new watches pass it equally. That is too clean. It launders the Invicta into belonging, and the Invicta does not belong. It is a fifty dollar plastic digital watch that fails every standard I hold, and no amount of sentiment about a good week changes what it is. It is in the collection despite not belonging there. That is the honest sentence, and I am not going to soften it.

The Breitling is different. The Breitling belongs. It was on the roadmap, it is a serious watch, it was chosen by Chrissy on the trip of a lifetime, and it satisfies the rules and the meaning at the same time. There is no tension in the Breitling. It is exactly what the framework was built to acquire, arriving early and arriving beautifully.

So what do I do with a watch that fails every rule and that I am still never going to get rid of? I keep it, and I am honest about why. Not because it secretly qualified. Because it was there, in the room, the same week my parents were aboard and my sons were newly graduated and my partner was beside me. The rules decide what I buy. They do not get to decide what I am allowed to keep when chance hands me something that witnessed a week like that. The collection is mostly discipline. The Invicta is the one exception that proves the discipline was always in service of something the discipline cannot measure.

That is the more honest landing. The framework governs acquisition. It does not govern memory. And every so often a watch that should never have made it past the door ends up staying anyway, not because the rules bent, but because the rules were never the only thing in the building.

One More Thing, in Georgetown

In Georgetown, Grand Cayman, I walked into Kirk Freeport and saw a Patek Philippe Calatrava in person for the first time. The terminal watch on my roadmap, the one that sits at the end of a plan that runs to 2053, sitting in a case in front of me in the Caribbean. It was gorgeous in the way that only a thing you have been moving toward for decades can be gorgeous. I did not buy it. It is not time. But I have now seen the door at the end of the hallway, and it is exactly as worth walking toward as I believed it was.

In the same store I spoke with a Rolex sales associate whose mother, it turned out, lives in the same city as my parents. We talked watches and we talked home, two people from the same small corner of Florida standing in a duty-free shop on an island, finding the thread that connects everything back to the people the watches are really about. The collection is a memoir told through objects. Sometimes the memoir writes a line for you, in a jewelry store in Grand Cayman, about how small the world is and how the people stay at the center of it.

Five watches for seven nights was a good plan. The cruise improved it the way reality improves a plan, by ignoring the theory and keeping the truth. The watch I packed for a party I skipped carried the week. Two watches I never planned for came home, one that belongs and one that does not, and I am keeping both. And at the end of the hallway, seen for the first time in person, the watch I am still walking toward.

— Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

Affiliate disclosure: I’m a proud Oceaneva affiliate. Use code BEZELS at oceaneva.com/bezels for 10% off your order. I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. The affiliation followed the collection, not the other way around.

The Guide

Most people who wear watches don't think about them when they travel. They pick one — the indestructible one, the cheap one, the one they wouldn't cry over — and they wear it every day until they're home. That is a completely reasonable approach.

But if you're reading this, you probably aren't most people.

A cruise presents a specific set of watch problems that land travel doesn't. You're aboard a ship in salt air. You're swimming in the ocean, standing under waterfalls, climbing ruins in ninety-degree heat. You're also, some nights, dressed for dinner in a restaurant that charges $200 a plate. The watch that works at Dunn's River Falls is not the watch that works at the captain's table. And you're doing both in the same week.

Here's how to think through it.

Start With Your Environments

A Caribbean cruise typically involves five distinct environments, each with its own demands. Sea days are casual — you want something comfortable, low-stakes, easy to reach for without thinking. Port excursions in cities call for something that looks good and doesn't advertise too much value to the wrong person. Active excursions — waterfalls, snorkeling, beaches — need real water resistance, not the nominal 30m rating that means 'don't shower in it.' Private resort days are somewhere between beach and sea day. Formal dinners call for something with presence.

Map your itinerary against those environments before you open the watch box. Know which days are which before you decide what's coming.

Understand Water Resistance Ratings — Actually

The rating on the caseback is not a depth guarantee. It's a pressure test conducted in a lab under static conditions. Moving water — surf, a waterfall, jumping into a pool — generates dynamic pressure that exceeds the static rating. A watch rated 50m is suitable for swimming in calm conditions, not for standing under a waterfall or diving from a boat. For genuinely wet excursions, 100m minimum is the honest threshold. 200m gives you real margin.

If you're going somewhere that will submerge the watch, the watch needs to be built for it. This is not a negotiable point.

Leave Your Best Piece Home

This is the rule most collectors resist and then follow anyway after one close call. Your grail watch — the one with the waiting list, the birth year, the story you'd need three paragraphs to explain — does not belong on a cruise ship. Salt air is corrosive. Crowded markets are crowded. Ship cabins are not safes. The watch you'd spend the rest of the trip worrying about is the watch that should stay on the shelf.

This isn't about fear. It's about appropriate deployment. A watch is a door, not a status symbol. Bring the doors that open onto the right rooms for that week. The grail opens a different room entirely.

The Replaceable Watch

Every cruise packing list needs at least one watch you'd be genuinely fine losing. Not fine in the 'I'll get over it eventually' way — fine in the 'I'll order another one before the ship docks' way. This is your excursion watch. Your waterfall watch. Your 'I'm going to forget I'm wearing it' watch.

The replaceable watch is not a compromise. It's a philosophy. It says: I've thought about this, I know what this day demands, and I've deployed accordingly. That's collecting intelligence, not collecting poverty.

How Many Is the Right Number

The honest answer is: however many your travel case holds, plus the one on your wrist when you board. That's not a joke. It's the only framework that actually works.

A four-slot travel case gives you five watches for seven nights. That's enough. One for sea days. One for active excursions. One for city ports. One for formal nights. One for the day you want something different. You won't need more than that, and you'll wear every one of them if you've packed with intention.

The Turn

That's the framework. It's sound advice. I'd give it to anyone.

Here's what I'm actually putting in the box for eight days aboard the Norwegian Prima — Port Canaveral to Nassau to Jamaica to Great Stirrup Cay to Cozumel and home — departing June 21st with Chrissy, the boys, and my parents. Jansen and Vaughan just graduated high school. This is our first cruise together as a complete family, and I'm building the whole trip around that fact. The watches I'm packing are part of it. The moments we'll have are the other part.

My travel case holds four watches. I'll wear one onto the ship. That gives me five.

The Longines Year of the Horse stays home. It lives in its box in the bedroom, and it will be there when I return. Some watches don't travel. That one has earned the right to stay exactly where it is.

The Five

Mido Baroncelli Jubilee — The Formal Dress Watch

Rose gold PVD case · Anthracite dial · Caliber 80 COSC · 80-hour power reserve · $601

I bought this watch for this cruise. Not for a hypothetical dinner, not for a future occasion — for the specific dining rooms aboard the Norwegian Prima on specific June evenings. Rose gold against a dark dial. COSC-certified movement with 80 hours of power reserve. It looks like it belongs somewhere with a wine list and a dress code, which is exactly where it's going. The ceiling of the bag. Everything else works around it.

Armand Nicolet MH2 — The Smart Casual Watch

Acqua dial · Swiss Made automatic · 43mm · Sapphire crystal · 100m · $800

The Mido covers the formal nights. The Armand Nicolet covers everything else that still requires intention — the smart casual dinners, the evening events, the hours between the sun going down and the dress code going up. Swiss Made, clean three-hand automatic, acqua dial that reads differently depending on whether the light is coming from above or from the side. It is the watch that says you dressed for the evening without saying you tried too hard. Forty-three millimeters of considered presence, for the rooms that don't require a tie but would notice if you didn't care.

Oceaneva Deep Marine Explorer II Navy Stainless — The Every Day

1250m water resistance · Sellita SW200-1 · 42mm · #26 of 1000 · $404

When you're on a ship, you want a dive watch. Not because you're diving — because the ocean is everywhere and you stop thinking about it. This is the watch for poolside, for sea days, for the casual hours when nobody is dressed for anything and the only requirement is that you stop thinking about what's on your wrist. Navy dial, stainless case, numbered limited edition. It communicates competence without announcing itself. That's the whole job.

Citizen Eco-Drive CC3031-51E — The Timezone Watch

Satellite Wave GPS · F150 movement · 3-second signal reception · 44mm · 100m WR · $408

You move through four time zones in eight days. Nassau, Jamaica, Belize, Cozumel, home. Each one is a different hour. The Citizen solves this problem the way solved problems should be solved: you stop thinking about it. Satellite GPS timekeeping receives a signal from the sky, computes your precise position, and displays the exact local time. Three seconds. Anywhere on earth. The perpetual calendar stays correct until 2100. The Eco-Drive means it never dies. It is the most practical watch I own, and it's coming because on a cruise crossing time zones, a watch that always knows what time it really is isn't a luxury. It's a solution.

Oceaneva Deep Marine Explorer II Damascus White — The White Party Watch / Falls Watch

1250m water resistance · Sellita SW200-1 · 42mm · Damascus steel case · White enamel dial · White FKM strap · $359

Norwegian Prima runs a white party on the first night at sea. The dress code is white. I have a watch with a white enamel dial, a Damascus steel case forged from layers of 304 and 316L stainless, and a white FKM rubber strap. Limited to 1,000 pieces. Acquired refurbished. The Damascus pattern on the case catches light the way folded steel catches light — differently depending on the angle, never the same twice. It is, without question, the most visually distinctive watch in the bag. Dunn's River Falls is a terraced waterfall climb in Ocho Rios, hands linked in a human chain, water coming down at you the whole way. The white watch goes to both. The FKM strap handles the heat and submersion better than any metal bracelet. Built for 1,250 meters of depth. Going to a waterfall and a party. The overkill is the point.

The Longines is in the bedroom. The case is packed. The gangway opens June 21st.

Five watches. Four in the case. One on my wrist when I walk aboard.

The Norwegian Prima leaves Port Canaveral on June 21st. Chrissy, the boys, my parents, and five watches that know exactly what time it is, anywhere on earth.

The Citizen doesn't care what time zone I'm in. Neither will I.

The Christopher Ward C60 Pool Diver arrives in October. It will make its debut aboard the Margaritaville Beachcomber, departing PortMiami April 3, 2027 at 4:00 PM. St. Thomas, San Juan, Puerto Plata, and home. Stateroom 2434 awaits. The second cruise already has its watch.

— Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

Affiliate disclosure: I'm a proud Oceaneva affiliate. Use code BEZELS at oceaneva.com/bezels for 10% off your order. I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. The affiliation followed the collection — not the other way around.

There are evenings a cruise gives you that don’t belong to any category on paper. Not formal. Not beachside. Something in between: a good dinner at a restaurant that doesn’t require a tie, a cocktail hour when the light is going gold, an evening where getting dressed meant something without meaning too much. The Mido Baroncelli owns the formal end. The Oceanevas own the water. Neither one answers the other question.

The in-between space is where the right watch earns its keep quietly. Something with enough presence to read as intentional, relaxed enough that it doesn’t own the room. A summer dress watch, in the truest sense: built for short sleeves and warm evenings, for occasions that reward thought without demanding ceremony.

That’s the gap the Armand Nicolet MH2 was bought to fill. Here’s the honest accounting of why it was acquired, what the brand is, and what the dial showed before and after wrist time settled the question.

Armand Nicolet MH2 A640A-TF-MA2640A · Acqua dial · 43mm stainless steel · ETA 2824-2 automatic · 25 jewels · 28,800 vph · 38-hour power reserve · Sapphire crystal · Exhibition caseback · 100m water resistance · Swiss Made · List $1,295 · Paid $800.36

A Watchmaker in the Bernese Jura

The origins of Armand Nicolet begin around 1875 in Tramelan, a town in the Bernese Jura. The Jura is not Geneva. It’s not the Vallée de Joux where the grand complications are born. It’s an agricultural mountain region that learned watchmaking the way it learned everything else: through patient, unhurried craft applied over generations. Armand Nicolet, son of a watchmaker, set up his Atelier d’Horlogerie after a brilliant apprenticeship, and by 1902 he had affirmed his technical maturity by producing a pocket watch with guilloché rose gold case, enamel dial, single button chronograph, complete calendar, and minute repeating function. That watch still exists. It’s in the brand’s museum in Tramelan.

When Armand died in 1939, his son Willy assumed control and developed the factory into one of the most important movement finishing operations in the region. This is the part of the story that most brand histories skip because it’s less romantic than founding myths. Armand Nicolet wasn’t making watches with their name on the dial during those decades. They were doing something more essential and less visible: finishing complicated mechanical movements for other famous Swiss brands. A genuine T1 operation. The kind of company that the watch industry depends on and almost never acknowledges.

In 1987, Willy Nicolet met by chance an Italian entrepreneur named Rolando Braga, who had been active in the watch field for two decades. Braga fell in love with the idea of recovering the extraordinary mechanical movements still held in the factory and decided to close his company in Italy and move to Switzerland. What followed was not a buyout. It was a collaboration: Swiss manufacture meeting Italian design sensibility, with production maintained at the historic Tramelan factory and a design and marketing operation established in Brescia, Italy. The technical rigor stayed in Switzerland. The aesthetic language came from Italy. The watches that emerged from that partnership don’t announce the collaboration. They wear it.

The MH2 is one of them.

MontreHeure 2: What the Name Means

MH2 stands for MontreHeure 2. The “Montre Heure” designation marks the midrange sports automatic line. The “2” doesn’t mean version two in the way consumer electronics use version numbers. It means the line evolved. Learned something from what came before it. Carried the good things forward and left the rest.

That’s a quiet kind of confidence. Not new and improved. Not a marketing refresh. Just 2. The watch that came after they understood what the first one needed to be.

The standard MH2 A640A is a three-hand automatic. No chronograph complications, no GMT function, no date window cluttering the dial. It does one thing: tells time. The case is 43mm stainless steel throughout, no ceramic, no PVD. Sapphire crystal. Exhibition caseback. 100 meters of water resistance. What’s inside that caseback is the ETA 2824-2, which is both the least romantic detail of this watch and the most important argument for it.

The Movement Case: ETA 2824-2 and Why It’s the Right Call

The ETA 2824-2 is not exotic. It won’t earn you a paragraph in a horological journal. It’s a Swiss workhorse movement that has been running reliably inside watches at every meaningful price point for decades, regulated and fitted by whoever is casing it, and largely left alone to do its job.

For this watch, that’s exactly the right choice.

The ETA 2824-2 runs at 28,800 vibrations per hour, 25 jewels, 38-hour power reserve. It holds its regulation, doesn’t demand babying, and will still be running correctly in fifteen years if you service it. When you buy a watch with this movement at this price point, you’re not paying for movement mystique. You’re paying for what the movement gets out of the way to show you: the case work, the dial execution, the design intelligence of a Swiss-Italian partnership that has been at this since 1987.

The roadmap watches require in-house manufacture movements because the movement is part of what you’re buying at that tier. The MH2 is a discovery-lane acquisition filling a genuine gap in the rotation. For that job, a well-regulated ETA 2824-2 is not a compromise. It’s the correct specification.

The Dial: Acqua and the Guilloché Beneath It

Armand Nicolet makes the MH2 in several dial colors. The acqua chose itself.

But the color is only half the story, and arguably the lesser half. Beneath the acqua finish is guilloché: an intricate hand-engraved pattern that catches light in every direction, a texture so detailed it reads differently depending on the angle, the hour, where you’re standing. Most people won’t know the word for what they’re looking at. They’ll just know they can’t stop looking. The guilloché is the real star of the dial. The acqua is what gives it color. Together they produce something that doesn’t have an obvious price.

The color itself is specific: the shade of shallow saltwater when the sun is directly overhead, the particular color that Florida water turns in the hour before sunset. It sits between teal and turquoise without committing fully to either one. It has depth without being navy. It’s warm without being green. In direct sunlight it pops hard, demanding attention in a way the rest of the watch’s clean stainless case does not. Indoors it settles into something more contemplative. That range is part of what makes the dial interesting to wear across occasions.

The case architecture supports the dial rather than competing with it. Stainless steel throughout, clean and unfussy. No functional bezel markings, no dive scale, no pretense of utility the watch wasn’t built for. It frames the guilloché acqua the way a good mat frames a painting: by being present without being interesting.

The Acquisition: The Blind Impulse Audit

Retail price on the Armand Nicolet MH2 A640A: $1,295.

What was paid: $800.36, through Jomashop, gray market.

The Blind Impulse Audit asks a harder question than the standard accounting. Not just what was paid and where, but what the filter missed in the moment, what the purchase was blind to, and whether the decision survives honest retrospection without dressing it up.

Here’s what the audit finds: the gap was real. The rotation had the Mido for formal evenings, the Oceanevas for anything near water, and a collection of divers and field watches that all announce their utility on the wrist. Nothing for the warm evening where getting dressed meant something without meaning too much. That gap had been present longer than the Armand Nicolet had been on the radar.

What was partly blind to: the 43mm case size, which reads differently in photographs than against the wrist, and which the bracelet resize confirmed is a real question rather than a spec-sheet number. Screw-pin links and two precision screwdrivers, nearly an hour to size it correctly. That’s a long time to think about whether a watch is the right call. It came out the other side still believing it was. The gray market channel at this tier is the right call for an ETA-based piece, and the Jomashop warranty coverage is not a meaningful trade-off for a movement that independent watchmakers have been servicing for decades. The audit holds.

What the Wrist Confirms

The 43mm sits perfectly. That was the open question, and the wrist time answered it.

Indoors the dial is very present. The acqua and the guilloché together are quite noticeable without being overbearing: the kind of thing that earns a second look from across the table without asking for it. The legibility is clean and immediate. The watch is comfortable across a full day in a way that doesn’t require thinking about it, which is exactly what a watch for casual occasions should be.

In direct sunlight the dial pops hard. The guilloché catches the light at every angle, and the acqua takes on more intensity outdoors than it shows in photographs or under indoor lighting. It’s a more visually dynamic watch than its clean case suggests it has any right to be.

This was a test run. The real occasion is the Norwegian Prima, sixteen days out. The watch passed with flying colors. That’s all a test run is supposed to do: confirm that the right piece is in the right slot before the moment it was actually bought for arrives. The MH2 is confirmed. The gap is filled. The Prima can come.

— Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

Affiliate disclosure: I’m a proud Oceaneva affiliate. Use code BEZELS at oceaneva.com/bezels for 10% off your order. I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. The affiliation followed the collection — not the other way around.

I did not buy this watch to collect it.

That sentence deserves to sit on its own for a moment, because it describes something that almost never happens in this collection. Everything in the case has a story that starts with want, with gap, with the particular pull an object has when it belongs in a life you are building. The Citizen Eco-Drive CC3031-51E Satellite Wave GPS started somewhere different. It started with a problem.

The Norwegian Prima leaves Port Canaveral on June 21st. Eight days, four ports, Nassau to Jamaica to Great Stirrup Cay to Cozumel and home. Every one of those stops runs on a different relationship with time — port arrival windows, excursion departure times, dinner reservations that do not move. I will be crossing time zones, stepping off a ship into equatorial heat at seven in the morning, and making my way back before the gangway lifts. A watch that requires a manual crown adjustment to update its timezone is a watch I will set wrong, or forget to set at all, or set correctly once and then get wrong again without noticing. That is not a small problem on a cruise.

So I did what the collection asks: I identified the gap, then found the piece that fills it exactly.

The CC3031-51E runs on the Citizen Caliber F950. It is an Eco-Drive movement, which means it draws power from any light source — indoors, outdoors, natural, artificial — and converts it through a photovoltaic cell beneath the dial. Citizen has been building Eco-Drive movements since 1976. This is not emerging technology. It is fifty-year-old engineering that has been refined to the point where a full charge runs the watch for approximately six months in complete darkness. I will not be in complete darkness. The charge question is settled before it becomes one.

Satellite Wave is the feature that resolved the timezone problem. The watch receives GPS signals from satellites orbiting at roughly 20,000 kilometers above the earth and uses those signals to set the time and timezone automatically, on demand, in a few seconds. I press a button. The watch finds a satellite. The time is correct. There is no crown to pull, no offset to calculate, no manual timezone database to scroll through. Nassau sets itself. Ocho Rios sets itself. Cozumel sets itself. I stop thinking about it.

The rest of the spec: 44mm case in stainless steel, 100 meters of water resistance, mineral crystal over the dial, perpetual calendar that handles date corrections automatically forever. It is a substantial watch on the wrist and a precise one. It arrived from Best Buy for $407.67

There is a version of this that runs further out. The Citizen F950 Attesa is the top of the Citizen Eco-Drive line: titanium case, in-house movement finishing, a watch that occupies a different tier of seriousness. I am not there yet with Citizen because I have not done the work with Citizen yet. This watch is the start of that work. If the CC3031-51E proves itself over years of travel, if the GPS function becomes something I rely on the way I rely on the Oceanevas in the water, then the Attesa becomes a legitimate roadmap consideration. The collection builds on evidence, not desire. The evidence starts accumulating June 21st.

I did not buy this watch to collect it. I bought it because it solved a problem. The collection gets to find out whether that is enough.

It usually is.

— Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

I looked at fourteen watches.

Glycine Combat Sub. LIV Dual Lume GX1. Citizen Promaster Dive. Straton Syncro Sports Day/Date. Berny Auto Titanium Railroad. Aristo Swiss Auto Aviator. LIV Gravel Full Lume. Tresod Ocean Master Swiss Auto. Shinola Lake Superior Monster Auto. TAG Heuer Aquaracer Pro 300 Night Diver. Doxa Sub 300 Carbon Whitepearl. Orient Sports M-Force Auto Orange. Tissot T-Sport Siderale Auto. And the Christopher Ward C60 Trident Lumière, which I want to say something about specifically: it is not on this list because I rejected it. It is on this list because it is not yet available. That watch is on my radar for a future conversation. This was not that conversation.

Thirteen watches considered and rejected. One not yet available. I bought the Oceaneva.

Again.

The brief was specific, the way the best briefs always are.

Two occasions. One watch.

The first: the Omni ChampionsGate Back to School Glow Party, a pool event, outdoor, after dark, the kind of evening that runs on UV light and momentum. I have been before. I know what it asks of a watch: water resistance that means something, visibility in blacklight conditions, a colorway that earns its place in that light. The second: the white party on the first night at sea aboard the Norwegian Prima, June 21st. The dress code is white. The ship is leaving Port Canaveral. The occasion is the opening act of a graduation cruise for Jansen and Vaughan, our first trip as a complete family. Both occasions were already on the calendar. The white party already had a watch assigned to it in print, in “Five Watches for Seven Nights,” before this piece existed. That assignment was correct. What this piece adds is the full accounting of how the watch got there.

Two occasions united by a single requirement: the watch needs to be white. Genuinely white. Not off-white, not silver, not a dial that photographs light against a dark strap. White. And it needs to be built for the water, because both of these events will find it there.

That requirement, applied honestly to thirteen candidates, leaves you in a specific place.

The Oceaneva Deep Marine Explorer II White Dial Damascus Steel Watch is, at first glance, the simplest watch in the lineup. White enamel dial. White FKM rubber strap. Damascus steel case and bezel, layered forge-welded construction of 304 and 316L stainless steel. Sellita SW200-1 automatic, 26 jewels, 38-hour power reserve, 28,800 bph. Anti-reflective domed sapphire crystal, 4.8mm thick. 14.8mm case thickness with sapphire at the thickest point. 1,250 meters of water resistance. 42mm case. Planned for 1,000 pieces in the white dial colorway, with 150 produced so far. Mine is number 90 of those 150.

The Damascus case is the thing. Not because Damascus steel is rare in this collection, it isn’t. The CIVIVI KwaiQ folder carries a Damascus Tanto blade. The Explorer VI carries a Damascus dial. But Damascus on a watch case is a different argument than Damascus on a blade, and different again from Damascus as a dial surface. The forge-welded grain is visible in the case walls, in the bezel, in the buckle. The pattern shifts with the light, with the angle, with the moment. Against a white enamel dial, the Damascus reads the way folded steel is supposed to read: like something made rather than manufactured.

In hand, it feels almost exactly like the Explorer VI. That’s not a surprise; the engineering family resemblance is intentional. What the white does is something the VI doesn’t do: it pops. The enamel against the Damascus grain is a genuine contrast, and the Grade A Swiss Luminova on the indices charges fast and holds. I’ve ordered a UV flashlight to charge the lume for video. It arrives today. Under blacklight, white reads differently than any other colorway in this collection. The watch was built for 1,250 meters of depth. It’s going to a pool party. The overkill, as always with Oceaneva, is the point.

The thirteen watches deserve honest accounting.

The TAG Heuer Aquaracer Pro 300 Night Diver is a legitimate piece with night-specific engineering and dive credibility stretching back to the tool watch era. It is also $1,500 to $2,000 for a watch I would wear to a pool party at ChampionsGate. The math doesn’t hold.

The Doxa Sub 300 Carbon Whitepearl is the most dangerous watch on that list. A genuine icon. The white dial, the Professional colorway, is exactly the aesthetic this collection has been circling since before there was a roadmap. The Carbon Whitepearl runs north of $1,500. It is on no roadmap. Buying it for a glow party would be precisely the kind of decision this collection has rules to prevent. It is still on the radar. It will wait.

The Glycine Combat Sub was a natural candidate given what’s already in this collection. The Airman Vintage The Chief lives here. The Combat Sub is a legitimate Swiss automatic in the right price range. It is not white. It was never going to be white. The brief eliminated it cleanly.

The others, the Citizen, the Orient, the Tissot, the Shinola, the LIV pieces, the Straton, are honest watches at honest prices from brands with real histories. None of them are white. None of them clear the water resistance bar without compromise. Several of them are interesting. None of them are right.

Thirteen watches, one brief, one correct answer. The rules don’t require a new brand when the brand already in the collection builds the right watch.

Here is the part I want to be honest about.

I have been resisting adding more Oceaneva.

Not because the brand doesn’t deserve it. Not because the collection doesn’t have room. Because there is a version of this where the affiliate relationship and the loyalty points and the refurbished sale invitations become a rationalization engine rather than a legitimate argument. I know what that version sounds like. I have been watching for it.

But the honest accounting produces a number that is hard to argue with.

Nine Oceaneva watches in this collection. Total MSRP across those nine pieces: $15,993. Total paid: $4,103. The delta is $11,890.

I own roughly $16,000 of Oceaneva for $4,100.

That number is the product of three separate mechanisms running in parallel, none of which were designed together but all of which compound toward the same outcome.

The first mechanism is the refurbished sale. Oceaneva invites previous customers, not loyalty program members, not subscribers, simply people who have bought from them before, to access refurbished inventory at discounts that are not available anywhere else. Both OceanTreks, the Navy Blue Explorer II, all four GMT 1250Ms, and this watch arrived through that channel. The discounts are heavy. The watches are certified and restored. The OceanTreks came in under $100 each. The Deep Marine Explorer II White Dial Damascus Steel Watch, a $499 watch at standard retail, arrived at $359.10 after my affiliate code.

The second mechanism is the affiliate relationship. Code BEZELS at oceaneva.com/bezels returns 10% to the reader and 8% back to me. That 8% commission runs quietly against every Oceaneva purchase in any given cycle, reducing the net effective cost of the collection below what the invoices already show.

The third mechanism is the loyalty program. One point per dollar spent. This purchase brought my balance to 4,636 points. I have already redeemed 4,500 of them for a $240 coupon toward the Oceaneva Power Reserve 6000m Red, a Grade 5 Titanium deep-sea piece limited to 50 units that ships in July 2026. Those points were not accumulated accidentally. They were the collected arithmetic of every Oceaneva transaction since 2022, saved deliberately for a specific watch. The ecosystem didn’t just reduce the cost of this purchase. It partially funded the next one.

Three mechanisms. None of them linked to each other. All of them running simultaneously. The result is a collection that grows faster, at lower cost, than any outside buyer could replicate at retail. That is not a loophole. That is what it looks like to be this far inside a brand.

The watch that broke my resistance wasn’t the most expensive one I could have bought. It was a refurbished piece at $359, solving a specific brief against thirteen considered alternatives, inside an ecosystem that made the math impossible to argue with.

The affiliation followed the collection, not the other way around. That sentence appears at the bottom of every piece I write about Oceaneva, and I am going to tell you exactly what it means in practice: I had the rules before I had the relationship. I had the watches before I had the affiliate code. The filter pointed at Oceaneva because Oceaneva was doing the work. The ecosystem followed from that, not the other way around. When the filter and the affiliate agree, I say so plainly and let the reader decide.

The white party is the first night at sea. ChampionsGate comes later, after summer settles in and the school year turns over and the pool lights go UV and everything white glows. The UV flashlight arrives today. Whatever the lume does under that light, it will be on camera.

Ninety of one hundred and fifty made. Damascus grain shifting in the Florida light. White enamel that does not apologize for being white.

The ecosystem did its work. I let it.

— Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

Affiliate disclosure: I’m a proud Oceaneva affiliate. Use code BEZELS at oceaneva.com/bezels for 10% off your order. I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. The affiliation followed the collection, not the other way around.

It started, as these things sometimes do, with the wrong watch.

I came across a Facebook post for a Maen collaboration. It was a brand I’d been tracking, paired with a dial I couldn’t stop looking at. Painted. Hand-painted. Not printed, not laser-etched, not the product of a machine that never blinks. An actual human hand had done that. I didn’t fully understand it yet, but something in the image pulled hard enough that I went looking.

That’s how I found IFL Watches. And that’s when I understood what I was actually looking at.

IFL Watches. Check their FAQ if you want to know what the letters stand for. It’s the kind of answer that tells you exactly who these people are.

IFL is a creative operation built around a premise that sounds almost too simple: the perfect canvas was already sitting on people’s wrists. Founded by Karar Aimer and operating globally, they’ve evolved beyond what a traditional watch company could ever be. They take genuine base watches like Casio, Seiko, Rolex, and Citizen. Recognized names with proven movements and proven cases. Disassemble them with certified watchmakers. Then an artist takes the dial and paints. Then the watchmaker reassembles everything with the same precision the original engineer demanded.

It’s a collaboration built into the process. Two separate crafts, two separate visions, one piece. They’ve extended this philosophy beyond watches into accessories and art installations. Sculptures made from vintage watch parts, clocks, wall art. The entire operation refuses the obvious. The result is something the original engineers never intended and probably wouldn’t recognize. That’s not a flaw. That’s the entire philosophy.

The Maen collab was priced beyond what I wanted to pay. So I kept scrolling through their catalog. Dials painted like galaxies, like oceans, like things you’d expect to see through a lens rather than wear on your wrist. Then I landed on the Casio Edifice Midnight Sky.

Deep blue. Stars rendered in abstract pointillism, each one placed by hand, the spacing slightly different, the weight of the brushstroke unique to the moment the artist made it. Built on a 39.5mm Edifice platform with polished and brushed stainless steel, integrated H-link bracelet with a folding clasp that micro-adjusts. A Seiko NH35A automatic movement inside: 24 jewels, 21,600 vibrations per hour, 40-hour power reserve. Sapphire crystal protecting the dial. 100 meters of water resistance. Limited to 200 pieces of this particular design.

The page said 1 left. I bought it. It went to sold out.

A day later, 1 left appeared again. My best guess? Someone put it in their cart, the timer expired, the inventory reset. Cart mechanics creating the illusion of availability. I don’t know for certain, but it makes sense. The next day it was gone again. Sold out. Weeks later, still sold out. The page now says “Sign up to be notified when the watch is available.”

I got the last one. Not the last one of the moment, or the last one until the next batch. The actual last Midnight Sky in this particular run.

And here’s what I didn’t realize until after the purchase had already cleared: if every dial is painted by hand, if no two star patterns are the same, if the artist’s hand never lands in exactly the same place twice, then there was always only one left. Every watch is a completely different watch wearing the same name. A new sky. A new moment frozen in paint. The scarcity of the run and the uniqueness of the dial are two different things operating in the same space.

The scarcity was real. And it still is.

I have a telescope. It’s too bright here in the suburbs of Tampa to see much with it. The kind of light pollution that erases the stars from the sky. They’re still there, of course. I know that. But knowing and seeing are different things, and I miss the difference more than I expected to.

So now I wear one instead.

There’s a broader case to be made for what IFL does. The industry’s best manufacturers, like Rolex, Tudor, and Omega, chase perfect repeatability, measured in microns. Every dial identical, every index aligned to a tolerance that would make a Swiss engineer comfortable. IFL inverts that logic entirely. They build the variation in on purpose. When precision engineering and artistic expression collide inside the same watch, most collectors never think about that collaboration. I find it quietly radical.

I’ve written before about the objects that earn their place in a life. Not the ones that arrive because of a name on the dial or a number in an auction catalog, but the ones that find you through a different door and turn out to belong. The Midnight Sky arrived through a Facebook ad for a watch I didn’t want to pay for. It belongs on the basis of what it actually is: unrepeatable, handmade, worn on a wrist that has spent years building a framework for exactly this kind of exception.

The watch arrived. There is deviation in the dial from the product photos, as there should be — hand-painted work carries variation. But the variation is refined, subtler than I expected. The pointillism holds its detail. This is my first Casio automatic, and it surprised me. It feels like a watch built to be worn, not just displayed.

The specs matter here because they’re not compromises. A Seiko NH35A is reliable and proven — used in watches that cost three times this price. The sapphire crystal protects the hand-painted dial without distortion. The 100-meter water resistance is practical for daily life. The polished and brushed finishing on the case creates depth rather than flash. This isn’t a watch where specs were cut to hit a price point. It’s a watch where specs were chosen to do the work.

The case is smaller than my preference. It’s 39.5mm instead of my sweet spot at 42mm. But that’s personal architecture, not a flaw. It wears really well. Everything feels considered. This is my first Casio automatic, and it surprised me. I love it.

If you’re looking for a 1-of-1 experience in a watch without paying six figures, this is the way to go.

-Jaime

I bought the Mido Baroncelli Jubilee for a ship.

Specifically, for the dining rooms aboard the Norwegian Prima. For the evenings when the Caribbean itinerary calls for something with presence, when the linen shirt comes out and the room has a wine list and a dress code and the kind of lighting that makes every decision you made getting dressed feel justified. Rose gold PVD case. Anthracite dial. COSC-certified movement with 80 hours of power reserve. A dress watch chosen for a specific week in June, aboard a specific ship, at a specific latitude.

It had other plans.

Mother’s Day came first. BJ’s Brewhouse in the early afternoon, the twins, my father, the kind of Sunday lunch that doesn’t announce itself as significant while it’s happening. Chrissy couldn’t make it. The occasion shifted on me and I wore the watch anyway.

That decision, wearing it anyway, is the whole story.

A dress watch is not a dress watch until it’s been somewhere. It’s just an object in a box, promising things it hasn’t delivered yet. The Prima is three weeks out. The Baroncelli needed a table before it needed a gangway, and Mother’s Day offered one.

There’s something I’ve been learning slowly across this collection: the object knows where it belongs better than you do when you’re buying it.

The Seiko I bought on my honeymoon wasn’t chosen for any dining room. It caught the light on a cruise ship gift shop somewhere between Florida and the Bahamas, and I bought it because I was happy and it was there. That watch is a Tuesday in the Bahamas when everything was exactly right. The occasion made it.

The Baroncelli is making the same argument from the other direction. I chose the occasion in advance: a Norwegian cruise, a June evening, the captain’s table energy. Then life rearranged the calendar the way life does. Chrissy couldn’t make it. The restaurant became a brewhouse. The first night out became a Sunday afternoon.

And somehow it was still right.

My father was at the table. That matters more than the venue.

He has his own relationship with watches, informal, unplanned, the kind of collecting that happens to a person rather than being built by one. He’s never had a roadmap or a spreadsheet. He’s just worn things that meant something to him, over the course of a life that earned the right to mean something. I don’t know if he noticed the Baroncelli. I know he was sitting across from it at a table with his grandsons, two weeks before they walk across a stage and start the rest of their lives.

The twins were there too. Jansen and Vaughan, both eighteen, both already wearing Oceanevas I handed them privately before the ceremony, both still figuring out what it means to carry something on your wrist with intention. They’ll understand it eventually. That’s fine. I’m building the education in advance.

I also got a free pizookie from the rewards program.

I want to be honest about that. A COSC-certified chronometer, a movement regulated to within seconds per day, an 80-hour power reserve, a watch positioned by Mido as their dress flagship, made its public debut alongside a complimentary skillet cookie courtesy of accumulated points. The watch didn’t flinch. Neither did I.

This is, in fact, the most B&B sentence I’ve written in a while: the Baroncelli had its first outing at BJ’s Brewhouse and earned a free pazookie. That’s not a failure of occasion. That’s a watch finding its footing in the real world rather than the one I’d planned for it.

The Prima departs June 21st. Eight days. Nassau, Jamaica, Great Stirrup Cay, Cozumel.

The Baroncelli is in the travel case. It will see the dining rooms I bought it for, the dress code evenings, the wine lists and the low lighting and the particular formality a ship achieves at sea when everyone agrees, for one night, to dress like they meant to be somewhere.

But it already has a first chapter. A Sunday afternoon in Tampa, three generations at a table that didn’t match the watch on paper and matched it completely in practice. A father who wears things that mean something. Two sons who will understand that someday. A free dessert from a rewards app.

Some watches need a grand occasion to begin. This one needed a table.

It found one.

—Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

The orange hit me before anything else.

Not the case, not the specs, not the price. The orange. That particular shade that sits somewhere between safety equipment and race car livery, the color that doesn’t ask permission. I’d wanted it on my wrist for years in the form of a DOXA Sub 300 Professional, that iconic tool dial that search and rescue divers wore into open water and that collectors have coveted ever since. The DOXA was never on the roadmap. The math never made it the right call. So the orange stayed a want, not an acquisition, until I found the watch that started everything for a brand I’d been quietly watching for a while.

The LIV GX1 The Orange Limited Edition. Blacked-out case, knurled bezel, orange pushers, orange dial emerging from black like something that means business. White numerals, black and orange silicone. MSRP $600. First Production on the caseback. Not a batch designation or a limited run marker, but a permanent marking on every GX1, because the GX1 is the very first model LIV ever produced. It wears like it knows what it is.

Florida doesn’t get credit for permanence. The reputation runs the other direction, sun and speed and impermanence, the place where things wash up rather than get built. But if you live here, really live here, you start to notice something. There’s a strain of founder in this state that pushes back against that narrative quietly and without apology. People building things meant to outlast the moment. Things meant to be worn hard.

Traska started in Jacksonville Beach when founder Jon Mack lost a vintage Bulova Snorkel diver to catastrophic water damage while traveling through Vietnam. Worn gaskets, compromised movement, dead watch. Out of that loss came a question worth asking: why wasn’t there a watch tough enough for a real life that didn’t cost a real fortune? He came home and built one. Seven years and multiple iterated models later, Traska has earned one of the most devoted followings in the independent watch space, built entirely through word of mouth, without a hype machine or a celebrity association in sight. Just product, iterated relentlessly until it’s right.

Man of the Sea operates in a different register entirely. Somewhere on the Florida coast, one man, Peg Leg Don, casts bronze nautical watches by hand using the lost wax process, the same method artisans have used for centuries. Place your order and come back in six to eight weeks. What arrives is semi-custom, individually crafted, and closer to wearable maritime sculpture than anything the watch industry has a category for. I follow him on TikTok because watching him work is its own kind of education. Peg Leg Don read the article and reached out to me to say that he uses a foundry in Seminole FL, to cast the cases, he makes the molds by hand.

NSB came out of New Smyrna Beach carrying the space coast in its bones, and the Apollo already has a wrist and a story in these pages. Find it if you haven’t. I was paying attention to Florida before it was obvious. The NSB piece was the first chapter of a conversation this piece continues.

Of all of them, LIV is operating with the broadest portfolio ambition, climbing deliberately across materials, movements, and price points with a visual language consistent enough to feel intentional at every tier. They started with an orange sport chrono that became the foundation of everything that followed.

The brand launched out of the Wynwood Arts District in Miami, the neighborhood that turned warehouse walls into cultural landmarks. That’s not a coincidence for a brand this deliberate about its visual identity. The watches are Swiss-made, built in Switzerland by a brand whose US headquarters happens to sit in the most visually ambitious zip code in Florida. Miami understands bold color. It understands water proximity, tool aesthetics, and the kind of life where what you wear actually gets used. The GX1 is a Miami watch, Swiss-built, wearing its address honestly. It belongs in that light.

LIV doesn’t make a few interesting watches. They’ve built five distinct product lines, P-51 Titanium, Trekker, GX-Diver’s, Gravel, and Genesis, each with its own identity, its own movement philosophy, and multiple variants underneath. Seventy-two watches across every major tool category. That’s a portfolio, not a product.

They’ve also figured out TikTok. If you spend any time on the platform, you’ve seen them. I see the ad at least five times a day, which is either aggressive targeting or a sign that the algorithm knows something about me I’m not ready to admit. What LIV understands is that TikTok isn’t where you close a sale. It’s where you earn the first look. The community they built on Kickstarter gave them the credibility. The TikTok presence gives them the reach. The watches have to do the rest. In my experience, they do.

It starts with the Genesis, the line that started everything, labeled on their own site as “First LIV Design.” Chaz and Esti Chazanow founded LIV in 2014, and Chaz brought over two decades of watch industry experience to the project before a single piece shipped. The original GX1 launched on Kickstarter that same year, funded within the first 11 hours, the most backed Swiss watch project on the platform at the time. The GX1-A followed and shattered records entirely, becoming the most-funded timepiece in Kickstarter history. Across their campaigns, LIV raised $3.2 million in 29 months, the most crowdfunded Swiss watch company ever. That’s not a brand launch. That’s a community building something from the ground up.

Above the Genesis sits the Trekker, their GMT automatic line powered by the Sellita SW330-2, 25 jewels, 56-hour power reserve, hand-finished in Switzerland with a LIV-spec rotor and custom hand heights tuned to the dial. Ceramic bezel, skeleton caseback, sapphire crystal. This is where LIV moved from sport chrono into serious automatic territory, and the Trekker holds its own against GMT offerings from brands charging considerably more for considerably less transparency about what’s inside.

The GX-Diver’s goes to 300 meters, serious dive territory, the same depth rating that defines a professional instrument rather than a lifestyle accessory. That LIV is operating here puts them in the same conversation as brands built entirely around dive credibility.

The Gravel is their outdoor sport chrono line, Dense Carbon cases, their proprietary carbon fiber and polyamide composite, built for conditions where a steel watch would feel like a liability. The McQueen GT40 limited edition sits at the top of that line in Gulf Oil powder blue and orange, referencing the 1968 Ford GT40 that Steve McQueen immortalized at Le Mans. Sixty-two grams on the wrist. You forget it’s there until you need it.

And then there’s the P-51 Cripes A’ Mighty 2.0, sandblasted titanium, ceramic bezel, skeleton caseback, ETA 7750 Swiss automatic, named for Major George Preddy’s P-51 Mustang, top-scoring American ace of the Second World War. The same movement Breitling and IWC have built reputations around at three and four times the price, in a titanium case, direct to consumer, no boutique markup, no heritage tax. I’m deeply considering it.

LIV parallels what Oceaneva was doing early. Not in aesthetic, Oceaneva lives in the serious dive segment, LIV in sport and lifestyle. But in structure. Both brands are building Swiss spec credibility through product rather than story, cultivating a community that feels like early access to something, and climbing upstream with intention. The brands that eventually make their own movements, Oris, Tudor, Christopher Ward with the SH21, all followed a version of this path. Volume first. Identity second. Movement third. LIV isn’t there. But they’re not doing anything that would preclude it either.

I had a question about what First Production actually meant, whether it was a batch designation, a limited run marker, or something else entirely. I asked. James from the LIV Concierge team responded the same day with the answer, pulled directly from the team. I’d reached out previously about the piece itself, and a real person on their text line, not a bot, asked me to send it over when it was done. That’s the LIV Pledge operating exactly as stated. Chaz has been in the watch industry for over 22 years. He and Esti built LIV because he wasn’t satisfied with what the market was offering, and that dissatisfaction channeled into product rather than complaint is what built everything you’ve read about in this piece. Customers on Trustpilot mention him by name, unprompted, noting that he personally reached out after their purchases. That’s not a marketing strategy. That’s a founder who hasn’t forgotten what the brand is actually for. When Chaz and Esti built LIV, they built it in the right zip code, with the right culture behind it. It appears to be operational policy.

Chaz’s story starts with a Swatch. A brother returning from Switzerland, an original still in its plastic case, a ten-year-old who put it on his wrist and never fully took it off. Mine starts with a Swatch Tennis. Different watch, different kid, different decade, same door opening in the same direction. I don’t know that either of us understood at the time what that first watch was actually starting. He figured it out faster. He chose watches over college, spent over two decades learning the industry from the packing room to the factory floor, and eventually arrived at a conclusion he couldn’t ignore: the market wasn’t offering what watch lovers actually deserved. So he and Esti built it themselves. “If everybody could do it,” Chaz says, “they would have done it already.” That’s not a marketing line. That’s what a kid with a Swatch grows up to say when he’s built something from nothing.

My GX1 is marked First Production on the caseback. Every GX1 is. Because the GX1 is where LIV began, the proof of concept that funded the Trekker, the Gravel, the GX-Diver’s, the P-51. The orange dial is as legible as anything I own. The 45mm case wears better than the spec suggests it should. The form-fit silicone integrates with the case geometry in a way that distributes the weight across the wrist instead of sitting on top of it. It is not the DOXA I always wanted. It is something more interesting, the first watch of a brand I believe in, acquired at the moment when believing still required some faith.

The best time to recognize something is before everyone else does. The second best time is now.

—JL

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

Affiliate disclosure: I’m a proud Oceaneva affiliate. Use code BEZELS at oceaneva.com/bezels for 10% off your order. I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. The affiliation followed the collection, not the other way around.

Affiliate disclosure: I'm a proud LIV Watches affiliate. Use code BEZELS at livwatches.com 5% off your order. I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.

I carried a secret for months.

Two watches. Same model. Different colorways. Bought deliberately, held quietly, waiting for the right moment. Jansen and Vaughan, my twin sons, eighteen years old, walked past me a hundred times since I ordered them. They had conversations with me at the kitchen table, in the car, in all the ordinary spaces of a life we share. They had no idea.

Friday evening at Clearwater Sound, before they walked across a stage and received their diplomas, I handed each of them a watch. Not a card. Not a handshake. A watch rated to 1,250 meters, built to last a lifetime, built for the deep end, built for wherever they were going next.

They didn’t know what they were heading into yet. I’m not sure I did either, at eighteen. But they had something on their wrists that was chosen before they had a plan.

The watches are Oceaneva GMT Deep Marine Explorer 1250M Pro Divers. Yellow and black for Vaughan. Red and black for Jansen.

I want to be honest about how that decision was made: I looked at both watches and went with what felt right. The same instinct that has driven most of the decisions worth anything in this collection. Vaughan is heading toward computer hardware, circuit boards, the internal logic of things, there’s something in yellow and black that fits that energy, a certain boldness, a willingness to be seen. Jansen, it turns out, is heading somewhere that requires a different kind of readiness entirely. EMT school first, then a few years of work, then Fire College. A man who intends to run toward what everyone else is running from. The red and black suits him just fine.

Two watches. One choice each. No crossover, ever. That last part matters more than it might seem.

I’ve been building watch collections for Jansen and Vaughan separately, in parallel, for a while now. The rule is simple and absolute: no piece in Jansen’s collection can appear in Vaughan’s, and nothing in either of theirs can appear in mine. When the collections eventually transfer, and they will, that’s always been the point, every single piece will be genuinely new to them. Nothing repeated. Nothing borrowed from somewhere else.

I built that structure for them before I told them it existed. That’s the part I want them to understand. Not that I gave them watches. That I thought about them specifically, as individuals, as two different people with two different futures, and built something that reflected that distinction. The no-crossover rule isn’t about the watches. It’s about saying: I see you as separate. I always have.

I gave them the watches before the ceremony, before the crowd, before the pageantry, before any of it became official. Just the three of us. They suspected nothing.

They both thought the watches were very nice. Expensive, even. They were right on both counts, though the real cost wasn’t the price, it was the months of quiet intention that preceded the handoff. They put them on. They wore them to lunch with their mother, then onto the stage at Clearwater Sound, then into the evening that followed.

After the ceremony, the whole family gathered, Chrissy, my parents, all of us, and we took the night to Bascom’s Chop House. Jansen and Vaughan wore their graduation robes to the table. More than a few strangers stopped over the course of the meal to congratulate them. The robes have a way of making an occasion legible to a room. At some point during the evening, the waiter noticed the watches and complimented them. Two eighteen-year-olds in maroon and gold, diplomas in hand, Oceanevas on their wrists, in a room full of people who recognized the moment for what it was.

In the photo after the ceremony, the three of us standing outside in the Florida evening light, Jansen already has the watch on his wrist. You can see it if you know to look. He didn’t take it off. Neither did Vaughan.

That’s the whole story, right there.

I didn’t have this. That’s worth saying plainly, not to generate sympathy, but because it’s true. What I’m building for Jansen and Vaughan is something I’m constructing forward, not passing back. A collection they didn’t know they had. A rule designed to protect them from ever receiving something secondhand. A first watch chosen with more thought than most people put into the last one they’ll ever buy.

I don’t know if they fully appreciated watches before Friday. Probably not the way I do. But I’d imagine one day they will. At some point in a life, everyone needs a good watch. And when that moment fully arrives for them, when they finally understand what they’re holding, they’ll already be holding something worthy of it.

The Norwegian Prima departs June 21st. Eight days. Caribbean ports. And somewhere on that ship, three Oceanevas on three wrists.

The Pro Divers were built for 1,250 meters of depth. We are not going to 1,250 meters. We’re going to Dunn’s River Falls in Ocho Rios, where the climb is wet and the water comes at you from above and you go up hand-in-hand with people you love and the whole thing is slightly ridiculous and completely right. The watches are rated for the deep end. What they’re actually getting is a Tuesday in Jamaica when everything is exactly as it should be.

That feels like a reasonable beginning.

This publication is a memoir told through objects. The objects are the door, not the subject. What I’ve been doing with this collection, the roadmap, the rules, the incremental decisions made one careful step at a time, isn’t really about watches. It’s about paying attention to the things that matter and not settling for less than they deserve. It’s about building with intention toward something you can’t fully see yet. It’s about resisting the disposable version of everything in favor of the thing built to last.

I want them to know that. Not from a speech, I kept it short before the ceremony, because the watches said most of it, but eventually, when they read this. That their father was paying attention. That the parallel collections exist. That the no-crossover rule was designed specifically so that when the time comes, everything in their hands is genuinely, completely theirs.

They walked across a stage Friday evening and started the rest of their lives.

They did it wearing something that was chosen for them before they had any idea what they were walking toward.

That was always the point.

— Jaime

Jaime is a affiliate with Oceaneva Watches. Oceaneva.com/Bezels use code Bezels for an addition 10% off.

C. Perry Snell said it himself: “I have never wanted to build just another building. I wanted to build something that would be a credit to the city and a joy to those who see it.”

He said that in 1926. The building opened in 1928. It is still standing at the corner of Central Avenue and 4th Street in St. Petersburg, Florida, and it is still the most interesting thing on that block.

I walked through it recently as part of a Florida Trust for Historic Preservation presentation — my team giving a walkthrough of a building most people pass without really seeing. I’ve been in a lot of buildings over the last twenty-four years. Snell Arcade is not most buildings.

The first thing you notice, if you’re paying attention, is the skin.

Terra-cotta glazed tile — not brick, not stucco, not the poured concrete that defines so much of Florida’s built environment. Actual terra-cotta, fired and glazed, brought in from somewhere that understood what permanence looks like. Pink Etowah marble from Georgia along the interior. Keystone along the exterior façade from the Florida Keys. A copper canopy, patinated now, shading the sidewalk the way it has since Coolidge was in the White House.

Twenty-five different tile designs inside the arcade alone — and here’s the detail that stopped me: Snell brought many of those tiles back from Europe himself, shipping crates of them across the Atlantic. They were mixed and matched without any preordained plan. No pattern, no grid, no system of repetition. Just the instinct of a man who had spent time in Spain and Italy and understood that beauty doesn’t always require a blueprint.

Every tile is original. Every tile has been there since 1928.

Snell was a pharmacist who became a developer — a chemist-turned-builder who spent decades reshaping the Pinellas Peninsula. He developed Snell Isle. He commissioned Richard Kiehnel, one of the most significant architects working in Florida in the first half of the twentieth century, to design something that would mean something.

What he got was a building that contains, as the historical record puts it, probably every architectural detail that Spanish architecture ever contained. Brackets supporting quadrafoiled arches. Ornate wrought iron. Moorish gothic windows. An ornate tower crowning the roofline. Seven imported statues of Venus on pedestals inside the arcade. Three skylights illuminating a barber shop, a shoe repair, a candy store.

The original plan called for two towers. The Depression stopped the second one from being built. But Snell had designed the foundation to carry both — which means the building standing today is incomplete by its own blueprint, and has been standing incomplete for nearly a century, and it is still the most interesting thing on that block.

There is something worth sitting with in that. The thing that wasn’t built is visible in the thing that was. Incompleteness as record. Ambition legible in the absence of what it couldn’t finish.

By 1933, the Depression had taken the building from him. Snell mortgaged it to fund Snell Isle, the real estate market collapsed, and the bank held it. He never got it back. He died in 1942, and in 1943 a local businessman named Hubert Rutland bought the building and began significant renovations.

Here is what matters about those renovations: Rutland closed off parts of the arcade. He added a mid-level floor. He made the changes his era required. And then, crucially, he stopped. No other significant changes were made during his ownership. The original historic features sat untouched because Rutland apparently understood — or at least intuited — that there are things you don’t improve upon. You maintain them. You protect them from the next wave of decisions.

The building remained in the Rutland family until 1980.

When it sold again, it went through an office conversion. Then, in 2003, twelve residential condominiums on the upper floors. The arcade was reopened. The building went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, which unlocked preservation easements, transfer of development rights, tax incentives — the full toolkit of mechanisms that make it financially rational to keep something alive rather than tear it down.

That toolkit exists because someone decided it should. Because the argument was made, persuasively enough, that a building like this is worth more intact than demolished. That the marble and the tile and the copper canopy and the twenty-five mismatched tile designs are a form of wealth that doesn’t appear on a standard balance sheet but is real nonetheless.

The Florida Trust for Historic Preservation exists to make that argument professionally, institutionally, year after year, building by building. It is, in its way, a collection of a particular kind.

I collect things. Watches, mostly — mechanical movements, things built to resist the disposable. Fountain pens. Vinyl records. Shoes with welts you can resoled a hundred times. The animating principle underneath all of it is the same: some things are built to last, and the ones that are deserve different treatment than the ones that aren’t.

The Snell Arcade was built to last. You can feel it in the materials — not in some romantic, metaphorical sense but literally, physically. Terra-cotta doesn’t crack the way cheaper cladding does. Marble doesn’t compress. Copper doesn’t rust; it transforms. The building is nearly a century old and the envelope restoration that happened in 2016 and 2017 was largely a matter of pointing joints, sealing caulk, repairing lintels. Not replacement. Maintenance. There’s a significant difference.

A watch movement from 1953 — the year Glycine introduced the Airman for Pan Am pilots — can be serviced today. The parts exist. The knowledge exists. The intention to build something that could be maintained rather than discarded was baked into the design from the beginning. The Snell Arcade is the architectural equivalent of that. Kiehnel didn’t design a building for its era. He designed a building for the next several eras, and trusted that each of them would find a use for it.

They have.

The rooftop terrace once housed Bob’s Spanish Village, an open-air night spot that became, during Prohibition, what the historical record charmingly describes as “the world’s worst speakeasy” — the sounds of the party bellowing into the streets with total disregard for the law. The basement was originally Bob’s Cafeteria, lit by a skylight ceiling set under the sidewalk above. An underground spring was breached during construction, flooding the excavation at 3 AM, and the original basement floor was poured two feet below the water table. A fact that has been creating ongoing moisture problems for a hundred years and has not, apparently, stopped anyone from using the basement.

Late in 2025, it was announced that the basement will become Medina 405 — a high-end social club with a wine cellar, a library, a billiard room, private dining, a golf simulator. Once rumored to be a bootlegger’s passage, now a members’ club. The building reinvents itself again without becoming anything other than what it is.

That’s the move. That’s always been the move. Not preservation in amber — not a museum piece behind velvet rope — but something living, adapting, absorbing each new era without surrendering the material fact of itself.

There is a quote attributed to Snell — “I have never wanted to build just another building” — that has been printed in enough historical documents that it’s become inseparable from the building itself. I don’t know exactly when he said it or to whom. But I believe it, because the building proves it.

You cannot build something like this by accident. The tile from Europe. The marble from Georgia. The keystone from the Keys. The foundation poured for two towers when the budget only covered one. The arcade stretching through the building to an open-air post office next door, creating a breezeway through the block in an era before air conditioning, when moving air was infrastructure.

Every one of those decisions was intentional. Every one of them is still visible a century later.

I walked out of that building thinking about the things I own that will still be here in a hundred years. The mechanical watches, maybe — the ones built from materials that don’t degrade, with movements designed to be serviced rather than replaced. The fountain pens. The records. The things I chose because they were built by someone who meant them.

Snell meant this building. You can tell.

———

The Snell Arcade stands at the corner of Central Avenue and 4th Street North in St. Petersburg, Florida. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1982. The Florida Trust for Historic Preservation works to ensure buildings like this one have a future as certain as their past.

I have rules about how I acquire things. Research before purchase. Write about the last one before you buy the next. One intentional acquisition per month. I have spreadsheets. I have roadmaps. I have a watch acquisition plan that runs to 2053.

I did not plan to own seven knives.

That’s not how it happened. There was no store, no rabbit hole, no afternoon of deliberate research that ended in a collection. Two people handed me something I hadn’t asked for, in a room I had earned the right to be in, and somewhere between the first knife and the second, the instinct woke up and started making decisions I hadn’t approved yet.

That’s the only kind of beginning that produces a real collection. The ones you plan turn into inventories. The ones that find you turn into something else.

December 2024. The end of a twelve-year road to third-degree black belt.

Chief Master David and Chief Master Laura Kowkabany are 8th-degree black belts in the American Taekwondo Association — an organization where 9th degree is Grand Master and the 10th will never be awarded again. Both of them have been offered the path to 9th. Both of them declined. They have one school, in Tampa, every class taught by their own hands for forty years. That choice — the mat over the institution, every time — is the context for everything they give and everything they withhold.

The curriculum at KFMA includes periodic clinics in gun and knife defense — taught to senior students, embedded in the testing requirements on the path to advanced rank. These are not electives. They are part of what the school considers complete training. I tested on knife defense technique on my way to fourth degree. When the Chiefs give a knife, they are not stepping outside the discipline. They are handing something from inside it.

The gift that year was a Gerber Ultimate Fixed Blade. Four point eight inches of 7Cr17MoV high carbon stainless, textured rubber grip, a sheath engineered for situations where the knife is the last thing standing between you and a bad outcome — fire starter, whistle, diamond sharpener, all of it built in. It is a survival knife in the most literal sense. Not a display piece. Not a conversation starter. A tool designed to keep you alive when everything else has failed.

It was given privately. Both Chiefs. Three third-degrees. No audience beyond the people who had earned the right to be in the room.

I didn’t know then that it was the first of two.

December 2025. The SOG Sogfari Kukri.

Twelve inches of blade. Eighteen inches overall. A double-cut sawback spine, a spiked tang built for pounding through whatever the path throws at you, a ballistic nylon sheath that suggests the knife was designed for forward motion. The Gerber asks: can you survive where you are? The Kukri asks something different. It asks: can you move through?

Same room. Same people. Same private moment.

I don’t know if the Chiefs planned the progression. I’ve never asked. But two knives, two years, one sequence — year one: here is what you need to survive; year two: here is what you need to advance — is not a coincidence. That is a philosophy. It comes from two people who have been teaching philosophy on a mat in Tampa for forty years, whether they call it that or not.

The Gerber and the Kukri are the anchor pieces. The collection exists because of them. Everything since is in conversation with what they started.

Before I knew I was building a collection, I had two knives that turned out to belong to one.

The Mossy Oak Bowie came in 2017 — eight and a half inches of blade, full-tang construction, brass handguard and pins, a rosewood handle that has darkened the way rosewood darkens when it’s been held enough times. It’s the oldest piece. It predates the collection as a conscious project by seven years, which earns it a particular kind of status: not quite an anchor piece, not quite a collection piece. A legacy piece. The thing that was already there when the framework arrived to make sense of it.

The Unlimited Wares HK-1037S came the following year. Camo pattern, sawback spine, hammer pommel, weight-reduction cutouts that give it the look of a knife designed by someone who took the brief seriously. Five ounces. Ten and a half inches overall. 3Cr13 stainless — the honest entry-level steel, the steel that tells you what a blade can be before you understand what the better steels are doing differently.

Neither of them is where the collection lives now. But they were there first, and they stayed, and that counts for something. In any collection built around objects that endure, the things that simply refused to leave deserve their place at the table.

A collecting instinct, once it’s awake, develops opinions quickly.

The Smith & Wesson M&P Special Ops folder came in 2025 and went immediately into the pocket, where it has been every day since. Spring-assisted, recurve Tanto blade, Veff-style serrations, G10 handle with enough texture to hold when the hand is wet or cold or moving fast. Two point nine seven inches of 8Cr13MoV — the step up from 3Cr13, the steel that starts to teach you what edge retention actually means. It is not a display piece. It is the carry. The knife that goes everywhere, the one that answers the question every serious collection eventually has to answer: if you could only keep one, which one? Right now, for me, it’s this one.

The CIVIVI KwaiQ arrived in 2026 and announced itself immediately as something different. Damascus Tanto blade, inline flipper, two point nine seven inches of folded steel that is, honestly, as much art as it is knife. Damascus steel is not the most practical choice — it requires more attention, more care, more awareness of what you’re doing with it. But there is a reason Damascus has been made for centuries, and looking at that blade, the reason is obvious. It is the most visually distinctive piece in the collection. It earns its place by being exactly what it is and not pretending otherwise.

The Kizer Cabox 1048M1 is the argument for utility. D2 tool steel — hard, holds an edge at the cost of some corrosion resistance, the workhorse steel, the steel that doesn’t forgive inattention but rewards the collector who pays it. PVD coating, multicolored G10 handle, three point three six inches of blade in a compact fixed form built for scout carry. It is not romantic. It is excellent. Sometimes that’s the more important quality.

And then the Buck Knives 382 Trapper C, which is a conversation with a completely different tradition. Two blades — clip and spey — 420J2 steel, burlwood handle with nickel silver bolsters, six point one two five inches closed. A traditional American trapper pattern that has been made and carried and used and repaired for longer than most of the other steels in this collection have existed. The Buck doesn’t belong to the same world as the Gerber and the SOG. It belongs to an older world, one where a folding knife was a daily working tool that a man carried until it wore out and then replaced with the same pattern because the pattern was right. I added it because a collection that only speaks one language isn’t really a collection. It’s a preference list.

The collection lives on a green leather mat in my study — B&B embossed in the surface, the logo pressed into the leather the way anything worth keeping eventually earns its mark. The loupe is there. The strap tools. The bourbon glass in the corner of the frame. It is the same surface where watches get opened and evaluated and understood, and it turns out to be exactly the right surface for blades too. Some things belong together because they share a philosophy, not because they share a category.

The Gerber and the SOG are already there. The carry is in the pocket. The legacies have found their place.

The display is still an open question. The larger fixed blades want a different solution than a case — one that accounts for sheaths, for scale, for the difference between showing a knife and housing it correctly. I haven’t found the right answer yet. I’m not going to settle for the wrong one.

That’s not an admission of incompleteness. That’s the collection being honest about where it is. The Chiefs spent forty years not settling for the institutional path when they knew the mat was the right one. The least I can do is extend the same patience to the question of how to display what they gave me.

The anchor pieces are home. The philosophy is clear.

The rest will follow when it’s ready.

— Jaime

The paint is called Tropical Hideaway.

I want to be honest about that. I spent weeks debating the color — hunter green, sage, charcoal slate blue, deep teal. I consulted the room, the furniture, the sightlines, the coastal palette of the rest of the house. I thought carefully about what the room needed to be and how the color would serve that intention. I drove to Lowe’s, stood in front of the Valspar wall, and landed on a chip that was exactly right.

It’s called Tropical Hideaway.

I’ve made peace with that.

The room is a pass-through. That matters architecturally and it matters for the story. There are no doors to close, no way to seal it off from the rest of the house. It opens at both ends and has a window into the kitchen. Whatever goes on those walls has to live with everything visible from them — the seafoam kitchen, the sandy tan hallway, the dark sky blue accent wall in the dining room. The room can’t declare itself a separate world. It has to belong.

The rest of the house is coastal. Not kitschy beach house — something more considered than that, more deliberate. Blue and sandy tan. Seafoam. The palette of a Florida home that takes itself seriously without trying too hard. I’ve been building toward that aesthetic for years.

And in the middle of all of it, for longer than I’d like to admit, there was a red and brown recliner.

It was my mother’s chair. That’s the whole origin story. It arrived the way inherited things arrive — without ceremony, without a conversation, already occupying the space where something else might have gone. It lived in my living room for years. Red, in a house of blues and sandy tans and seafoam. I considered reupholstering it more than once. I never did. The chair was fine. It held a person in a seated position without complaint. It just wasn’t mine, and it didn’t belong to the house I was building.

In February I moved it to the study. A temporary measure while I figured out what I actually wanted in there. The study had been an unused room — broken inversion table, boxes of empty picture frames, the particular accumulation that happens when life moves fast and some things just land wherever they land and stay there. I’d been clearing it slowly, uncovering the built-in shelving that came with the house, building toward something I could feel but hadn’t fully named yet.

Mom’s recliner held the corner while I figured it out.

As chance would have it, my mother needed it back. She’d made an offhand comment about wanting somewhere to sit when my father has the television. The chair that never quite fit anywhere in my house turns out to be exactly what she needs in hers. It’s going home. That’s the right ending for it — not a replacement, not a disposal, just a thing returning to where it belongs so something else can finally take its place.

The replacement is a brown oil wax leather push-back recliner — the Red Barrel Studio Ikraam Chance, parawood frame, channel tufting, walnut arms. I knew where it was going before it arrived. That’s how the right things work. You don’t buy them and find a place for them. You know the place first.

It landed the way I expected. The walnut arms against the honey maple shelving. The dark brown leather in the corner with Tropical Hideaway behind it. The channel tufting — structured but not stiff, considered but not precious. I sat in it for the first time and looked at the room and thought: there it is. That’s the sentence, finished.

To the right, the turntable and vintage receiver and the records I’ve been accumulating for longer than this publication has existed. To the left, the side table with whatever I’m reading and whatever I’m drinking. On the wall beside the door, framed in black: three black belt certificates and the trophies and medals from various 2019 tournaments. The year I won the state title in sparring, forms, combat weapons. They are going to sit nicely next to the 2026 titles from this season. Biography on a wall. Across the room, the French doors to the pool, the bronze ceiling fan turning slowly overhead.

On the rug, unbothered by all of it: Scooby. He’d claimed that spot before the paint dried and hasn’t reconsidered since. Some decisions make themselves.

I want to say something about what it means to finally finish a room.

I collect mechanical watches because they are built to last and meant to be carried forward — serviced, not replaced. I collect vinyl because it resists the convenience of disappearing into a subscription. I collect fountain pens because choosing how to write is its own kind of statement. None of these things were accidents. All of them were decisions, made one at a time, building toward something I could feel before I could name it.

The room works the same way. The shelving was here when I bought the house in 2017, left behind by a woman I never met, a grandmother who moved into assisted living and left her built-ins for whoever came next. The books arrived over forty-something years. The records came slowly and then all at once. The memorabilia — the Emmitt Smith cards, the framed photographs, the baseball, the beer stein — all of it was already mine. It just needed somewhere to sit down.

The red recliner was the last thing I was still borrowing from someone else’s life. It’s gone now. Everything in the room is chosen.

The workbench wall came last. That’s where I open watches — green felt mat, loupe, strap tools, the particular quiet of a Saturday evening with nowhere to be and something worth paying attention to. The new mat arrived recently: green leather, larger than the old felt, the Bezels & Bourbon logo pressed into the surface along with the tagline. It fills the frame the way it’s supposed to. It looks like it was always going to be there.

The cigar humidor lives on that bench too. The room holds everything — watches, records, books, bourbon, cigars, forty-something years of a life that finally has the right place to put it all in the same room at the same time.

The knife display cases are still coming. Two wall-mounted boxes, walnut finish, glass fronts, black interior lining — going up on the fourth wall when they arrive. The Damascus blades will look the way they’re supposed to look behind glass, against Tropical Hideaway, in a room that finally knows what it is. That wall will finish itself when it’s ready.

Everything else is already in its place.

The paint is called Tropical Hideaway and I’ve stopped apologizing for it. The name is slightly absurd for a room I spent weeks designing with intention. It’s also, if I’m being honest, exactly right — a Florida man building a considered retreat inside a coastal house, landing on a color that bridges seafoam and deep water and warm wood grain and aged leather, and discovering that the name on the chip was Tropical Hideaway all along.

Some things just name themselves.

The room didn’t start anything. The Emmitt Smith rookie card was 1990. The books in the childhood cabinet go back further than I can clearly remember. The construction career that taught me what craft actually costs — twenty-four years of that. The taekwondo certificates on the wall represent twelve years and a third-degree black belt and a state championship and two instructors I’d follow anywhere.

The room is just where all of it finally had somewhere to sit down.

Scooby already knew that. He picked the spot before I finished painting.

-Jaime

There’s a bottle of Angels Envy on my shelf that I will probably never open.

It was a gift from Chrissy’s brother. First Christmas with her family. He pulled my name from a hat and had to make a guess about who I was based on whatever Chrissy had told them. He landed on Angels Envy — not a safe generic bottle, not something you grab off the bottom shelf because you don’t know what else to do.

More specifically, he found the Private Selection, a Total Wine exclusive expression that isn’t sitting on every shelf waiting to be grabbed. That’s not an accident. That’s someone who did a little homework. Angels Envy Private Selection says I heard you drink bourbon, I took it seriously, and I went looking.

I’ve kept it sealed ever since.

If you asked me to defend that, I’m not sure I could. Not fully. The honest answer is that opening it feels like a different kind of loss than just finishing a bottle. The bottle remembers the moment. The bourbon doesn’t. Once it’s empty, what’s left is a label and a question: why didn’t you open it when it mattered more?

So it sits. Sealed. Ahead of me.

There’s a word in the bourbon world for a certain kind of collector. A tater. If you haven’t heard it, the short version is this: someone who chases allocated releases not because they love bourbon, but because scarcity itself became the hobby. They camp outside liquor stores in September. They post bottle shots on Instagram. They trade on the secondary market like it’s an asset class. The bottle is never the point. The acquisition is.

I read a piece recently that traced how it happened — how Pappy Van Winkle went from a respected regional bourbon to a cultural phenomenon that turned otherwise reasonable people into something closer to hoarders than collectors. The mechanism is almost elegant in how it works: once something becomes impossible to find, the difficulty of finding it becomes its own reward. You stop tasting the bourbon. You start collecting the hunt.

I read it and I thought: I understand that impulse more than I want to admit.

I have 33 watches in hand (not all pictured), two more in transit, and two on pre-order. I know exactly why I have each one.

The roadmap that governs the collection runs to 2057. It has rules — actual written rules — about movement provenance, distribution legitimacy, finishing standards. There’s a No Go list. Thirty-nine brands that will never appear in the collection, not because of price, but because they don’t meet the standard. The rules exist because the knowledge exists. You can’t build a framework without first building the understanding that makes the framework necessary.

I know what makes one watch better than another. I can tell you why a movement matters, why a finishing standard matters, why buying from an authorized dealer matters even when gray market prices are lower. The knowledge came first. The rules followed. The collection is the result.

Bourbon hasn’t worked that way. Not yet.

My shelf has bottles on it that I can explain and bottles I can’t.

The Horse Soldier Barrel Strength is there because I spent my 48th birthday at the Urban Stillhouse in St. Petersburg, where a man named Tom walked us through the brand’s history with the kind of precision that makes facts feel like a narrative. The Green Berets who rode into Afghanistan on horseback after 9/11. The distillery they built when they came home. The bourbon that carries that weight in the glass. I bought the bottle because the story earned it. I understand exactly why it’s on the shelf.

The Key West Smuggler is there because a resort cantina got everything right when the resort itself got almost everything wrong. A $2,000 trip that underdelivered at nearly every turn — and then a bottle behind a bar that felt like the whole weekend’s compensation. I bought it because it was the best thing that happened that weekend and I wasn’t ready to let that go. I understand exactly why it’s on the shelf.

Then there’s the Uncle Nearest. It’s not on the shelf yet — I haven’t bought it. But it’s on the roadmap, and I need to be honest about why.

Uncle Nearest filed for bankruptcy. They’re being liquidated. A specific mash bill, a specific expression of American distilling history, may not survive what comes next. And when I read that news, something in me reached for the credit card before I’d ever tasted the bourbon. Not because I loved it. Because it was going away, and the going-away was the point.

That’s the tater impulse. I caught it. But I caught it because I recognized it from the outside — not because I had a framework that stopped it. There’s no bourbon No Go list. There’s no rules document. What stopped me was self-awareness and nothing more, which is a thinner line than I’d like to stand on.

Look at any shelf long enough and it starts to tell you things about yourself you weren’t prepared to hear.

I have four bottles I’ve actually consumed from my collection. Four Roses. A few regional straight bourbons I picked up along the way. Nothing precious. Nothing that cost more than thirty dollars. The bottles with stories — the ones with names and moments attached — those stay sealed. I treat them preciously because they are precious, which sounds like a collector’s logic right up until you realize a sealed bottle is also a promise deferred.

The two things look identical from the outside. The tater’s sealed bottle and the collector’s sealed bottle are both just bottles. The difference is internal — it lives in whether you know what you’re preserving and whether you have an answer for when you’d open it.

Ask me when I’d open the Angel’s Envy and I don’t have a clean answer. Maybe if I had two. One to drink and one to keep. One for the present and one for the record. That’s not a purchasing strategy — that’s a philosophy. It acknowledges that both impulses are legitimate without letting either one win entirely.

Ask me when I’d open the Horse Soldier Reserve and I know exactly: the right night, the right people, something worth marking. That bottle has an occasion waiting for it somewhere down the road. It’s not deferred indefinitely. It’s deferred specifically.

The difference between those two answers is the distance I still have to travel with bourbon.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand, slowly and somewhat against my will:

A shelf becomes a collection the moment it develops a conscience. The moment it knows not just what it wants, but what it doesn’t want. The moment the next acquisition has to answer to the ones that came before it.

My watch collection has a conscience. It was built deliberately, over time, through the accumulation of knowledge that eventually made the rules possible. I know what I don’t want and I can tell you exactly why. That clarity took years. It took bad purchases and corrected courses and the gradual assembly of a framework that now holds the whole thing together.

My bourbon shelf is earlier than that. The sentiment is there — the Horse Soldier, the Key West Smuggler, the Angels Envy from a man who got it right before he knew me. The instinct is there. The almost-Uncle Nearest tells me the conscience is forming. But the framework hasn’t arrived yet. I’m still in the years before the rules write themselves.

That’s not a failure. It’s a position on a road I recognize, because I’ve traveled it before — just with watches instead of bourbon.

The tater’s shelf will never develop a conscience because the tater doesn’t want one. A conscience would slow things down. A conscience would say no sometimes. The tater’s entire operating logic depends on yes being the only answer.

My shelf can still say no. It just needs to learn what it’s saying no to.

I ended the Horse Soldier piece with three words: Perfection in the glass.

I meant it when I wrote it. I still mean it. But I understand now that I was describing the experience of that night — Tom’s delivery, the Barrel Strength at 48, the weight of the story in the room — more than I was describing the bourbon itself. The perfection was in the context. The glass was the vessel.

That’s not a criticism of the piece. That’s where I was.

I’m somewhere further down the road now. Not arrived — I want to be clear about that. I still couldn’t give you a full account of what separates a great mash bill from a good one. I still reach for sentiment before I reach for craft knowledge. The vocabulary that bourbon people deploy so fluently — vanilla on the front palate, cinnamon on the finish — I hear it and I’m not always sure how much of it is perception and how much of it is the price of admission to a community.

But I’m paying attention in a way I wasn’t before. The Angels Envy stays sealed because it holds a moment. The Uncle Nearest stays on the roadmap as a question — not a reflex purchase, but a considered one. The Key West Smuggler holds a whole weekend inside it, the good part of a trip that mostly disappointed, and I’m not ready to open that either.

The shelf knows more than I do right now. I’m working on closing the gap.

Perfection in the glass, ongoing.

Jaime writes about watches, bourbon, and the things worth keeping at bezelsandbourbon.com.

There is a version of Hawks Cay Resort that exists in photographs. A private saltwater lagoon fed directly by the Atlantic, shimmering at golden hour. Five pools framed by swaying palms. A marina. A spa. A flagship restaurant from a Michelin-starred chef promising to “set a new standard for dining in the Florida Keys.” Aerial shots that make Duck Key look like the kind of place where everything is taken care of.

Chrissy’s birthday was April 7th. We booked Hawks Cay for the 10th through the 12th — a deliberate choice, a few days after the day itself, to give the occasion room to breathe. It was also our third anniversary. Two things worth celebrating, one carefully chosen weekend, the most expensive hotel I’ve ever stayed at.

The choice wasn’t made lightly or randomly. Numerous people had told us how much they loved Hawks Cay, or that it was somewhere they’d always wanted to go. My current boss had a connection to the island going back years — his family owned a townhouse there. The reputation was real, earned over time by real people whose opinions I respect. That matters, because this piece isn’t written from the chair of someone who showed up looking for something to criticize. It’s written from the chair of someone who showed up with genuine expectations, built on genuine word of mouth, and left with a different story to tell.

That version of Hawks Cay — the one in the photographs, the one people remembered fondly — is the one we came for.

What we got was the other one.

We paid $740 a night. Two nights, roughly $2,000 all in. That is, by a meaningful margin, the most expensive hotel stay of my life. I don’t say that to establish victimhood — I say it because price is a promise, and what I’m writing here is an accounting of whether that promise was kept. We also drove seven hours to get there. This was not a spontaneous decision. It was a planned celebration that cost real money and real time.

The short answer is regarding the promise: mostly not.

The Resort Itself

I want to be fair, because fair is the only credible register for this kind of piece. Hawks Cay is genuinely, physically beautiful. The saltwater lagoon is the real thing — tidal, alive, fed from the ocean, with paddleboards and kayaks and the kind of water that makes you understand why people come to the Keys in the first place. The grounds are lush. The setting on Duck Key, miles from the noise of Marathon, has a quiet that a lot of resorts pay landscapers to fake and still can’t achieve.

If you are booking Hawks Cay to float in a lagoon and look at the sky, you will not be disappointed by what you find.

I’ll add one more genuine bright spot: the resort cantina. I came away with a bottle of Key West Smuggler’s Bourbon and a five-stick box of Rodriguez Reserva Privada cigars (which I am sure they overcharged me for). For a man who writes about bourbon and collects things worth keeping, that’s a meaningful find. The cantina delivered exactly what it promised, without pretense and without fanfare.

So did Angler and Ale, the resort’s casual waterside restaurant. On Friday evening we sat down to a smoked old fashioned — finished with a smoked Rodriguez cigar wrapper — that we’re still talking about. The dry rub chicken wings were exceptional. Genuinely, without qualification, one of the better bar meals we’ve had in recent memory. Angler and Ale knew exactly what it was supposed to be and executed without apology. That matters, because it tells you the talent exists somewhere on this property. The problem isn’t that Hawks Cay can’t deliver a memorable experience. It’s that they can’t deliver one consistently, or intentionally, or where it counts most.

Everything after that requires more careful accounting.

The Room

We had a ground floor king room with a patio. The patio faced the parking lot.

At $740 a night, that is the room they gave us. It was clean. It was serviceable. It was indistinguishable, in any meaningful way, from a roadside Hampton Inn. Nothing about it signaled that someone had thought about the guest who would be sleeping there, or what they might have paid, or why they came.

The Pool Situation

Hawks Cay operates three pools (we never found the third pool) and two jacuzzi’s, including an adults-only option called Oasis Cay. I’ll say plainly: the Oasis Cay saved the weekend. Without it, we would have had no outdoor space that felt calibrated to what we came for. The main resort pool was overrun with children — which is not a moral failing, it’s a family resort, and families come — but it meant that the two-pool structure wasn’t a luxury, it was a necessity. The adults pool wasn’t an upgrade. It was the baseline.

What surprised us about both spaces was the absence of service. No poolside drink service. No attendant. Speakers on the deck that didn’t function. Umbrellas that no one had opened — in Florida, on a sunny afternoon, at a premium resort. These aren’t exotic requests. These are things you find at a Marriott Courtyard with a pool bar. At $740 a night, the expectation isn’t unreasonable. The execution wasn’t there.

And then there’s this: the pools and jacuzzis close at sundown. In April, that’s barely 8:00pm. We came back from dinner — disappointed, as I’ll get to — wanting to decompress in the water, let the evening recover, find something to salvage from Chrissy’s birthday. The jacuzzi was closed.

Hawks Cay’s own marketing sells you the Florida Keys sunset. Their Sunset Pool is named for the view. They offer sunset cruises. In April, sunset happens around 7:45. By the time the sky is doing what their brochure promises, they’ve locked the gate.

A Note on Identity

One of the resort’s bars is called Pilar. If you know your Keys history — or your rum — the name lands somewhere specific. Hemingway’s boat. The Florida sun. Salt and fish and something amber in a glass.

Pilar Bar is a sake bar.

I’m not sure what to do with that, other than to say it felt representative. Hawks Cay is a resort that has assembled a lot of appealing nouns — lagoon, marina, chef, farm-to-table, refined, elevated — without necessarily building the connective tissue between them. The Pilar Bar serving sake isn’t a scandal. It’s a symptom.

They’re also building a water park on property, scheduled to open this summer. I mention this without malice — a dedicated water park will pull families toward something purpose-built for them, and that’s genuinely good for couples and adults sharing the same resort. But it also tells you where this property is heading. They are not resolving the identity tension between “family destination” and “elegant getaway.” They are adding more of both and hoping the adults-only pool holds.

The Service Problem

We were there for a birthday and a third anniversary. Both occasions were knowable — they exist in reservation systems, in OpenTable notes fields, in the ordinary course of what a hotel at this price point is supposed to track and act on. A gesture wasn’t required. A card would have been enough. A mention at check-in. A word from the server at a $210 dinner. Anything that signaled someone at Hawks Cay understood why we were there.

Nothing. Not one acknowledgment across the entire weekend from any member of staff.

A dog in a neighboring room barked through the afternoon. We called the front desk. No answer. No callback.

During our stay, we observed multiple guests at the front desk actively complaining about unresolved issues. That’s not anecdote — that’s a pattern. A front desk where guests are stacking up with grievances is a front desk that has stopped getting ahead of problems.

Several staff members we encountered did not speak functional English. I want to be precise here, because the issue isn’t origin or accent — the issue is communication, and communication is the entire mechanism of hospitality.

One afternoon at the adults pool, a man was restocking the towel station as we were leaving. There was no signage indicating where to return used towels — a small bin tucked under the dry ones seemed the likely answer, but I asked the man to confirm. He made sounds back at me. Not words. Sounds. I know enough Spanish to recognize Spanish. It wasn’t Spanish. I don’t know what language it was. I returned the towels to the bin and we left.

That was not our only interaction of this kind over the weekend. When a guest cannot complete a basic exchange with a staff member — at any price point — something has gone wrong in the hiring or the training or both. At $740 a night, it is a failure with no reasonable explanation.

No issues were proactively addressed. No manager appeared at any point during our stay to check in, make an introduction, or signal that someone was accountable for the experience we were having.

Salt + Ash

A word on credentials before I write this section, because it matters.

We are not inexperienced diners. We’ve sat at Rocca in Tampa — a genuine Michelin-recognized experience — and left understanding exactly what that designation is supposed to mean. We’ve dined at Bern’s Steak House, which has been dry-aging its steaks in house and running one of the finest dining rooms in the country since 1956 without a Michelin star to its name, because it doesn’t need one. If there is a better food-to-service-to-value proposition in American dining than Bern’s, I haven’t found it. We’ve eaten at enough tables, in enough rooms, to know the difference between a restaurant that earns its price and one that doesn’t.

I say this not to establish superiority but to establish context. The criticism that follows is not the complaint of someone who expected the impossible. It is the observation of someone who knows what possible looks like.

Their own website calls it “the culinary centerpiece of Hawks Cay Resort.” A restaurant that “sets a new standard for dining in the Florida Keys.” It is the concept of Michelin-starred Top Chef winner Jeremy Ford, built around land, sea, and fire, farm-to-table sourcing, locally grown ingredients, bold flavors meeting refined technique.

That is the promise.

We had a 6:45 reservation on a Saturday evening — our anniversary dinner, at the resort’s flagship restaurant, the centerpiece of a weekend we had planned deliberately. The dining room held fewer than 20 guests. It took ten minutes to be shown to our table. Our server took another fifteen minutes to greet us. Twenty-five minutes from arrival to first acknowledgment, in a room that was nearly empty, on a Saturday night, at the flagship restaurant of the most expensive hotel I’ve ever stayed at. On Chrissy’s birthday.

No explanation was offered. No manager came to the table. I don’t recall being asked, at any point during the meal, whether we were enjoying our food.

The food itself was mixed. Chrissy ordered the Local Florida Catch — salmon that evening — composed with bok choy, shaved fennel, marinated tomato, and chili garlic emulsion. It’s a specific, confident promise on paper. What arrived didn’t cohere. She described it simply as odd, and left more on the plate than she intended to. My Steak Frites was competently executed — the frites were crispy, the cognac peppercorn sauce was fine. But a skirt steak at $64 is a value proposition that demands justification, and a plate of frites doesn’t provide it.

Tasty is not the same as worth it.

The dining room on a Saturday evening included guests in swim shorts and flip flops alongside families with loud, unattended children. I recognize that the Florida Keys carry a particular casual energy, and I’m not asking for a dress code. I’m noting the environment you find yourself in when you’ve dressed for a birthday dinner at a restaurant its own resort calls “refined.” The room doesn’t know what it is.

The bill was $210. For a restaurant trading on a Michelin-starred chef’s name, at a resort charging $740 a night, the expectation of attentive service, consistent food, and a value proposition that justifies the price is not unreasonable. None of those things were reliably present.

I would not return. I would not recommend it for a special occasion.

A Point of Comparison

We have a reference point for this kind of weekend. Last year we stayed at the Cove Inn on Naples Bay — a waterfront property on the marina in Old Naples, walking distance from downtown, the Gulf beaches, and some of the better restaurants in Southwest Florida. Two nights, $503 total. The rooms were twice the size of our Hawks Cay room, with a direct marina view. The pool was ice cold. There was no jacuzzi. Nobody on staff was going to be named in a hospitality industry award anytime soon.

It was fine. It was exactly what it said it was.

One evening we skipped the hotel’s on-property restaurants entirely and walked to Warren, an American whiskey kitchen a short drive away. Expansive whiskey list. Attentive service. Food that justified the bill. A staff that seemed to understand why people were sitting in their dining room. We left satisfied in the way you should leave a dinner — not relieved that it wasn’t worse, but genuinely glad you went.

The Cove Inn didn’t promise elegance and fail to deliver it. Warren didn’t market itself as setting a new standard and then leave us waiting 25 minutes to be acknowledged. Neither pretended to be something they weren’t.

In hindsight, I went a little overboard with Hawks Cay. Our third anniversary isn’t until the 29th, but the trip was priced to cover both occasions — the birthday and the milestone. Closer and cheaper would have served us better. That’s on me. But the gap between what Hawks Cay charges and what Hawks Cay delivers is on them.

The Final Accounting

I collect watches. I drink bourbon. I have spent a meaningful portion of my adult life learning to tell the difference between things that look expensive and things that are worth what they cost. That calibration applies to a dial, a dram, and a dinner. It applies to a weekend.

For what we spent at Hawks Cay, I could have put a Longines HydroConquest on my wrist and taken Chrissy somewhere that actually delivered on its promises for less.

The lagoon is beautiful. The Oasis Cay pool is a reasonable place to spend an afternoon. The setting on Duck Key is genuinely special. Hawks Cay has solved, with some success, for the photograph.

They have not solved for the experience of being there.

That gap — between the image a place projects and the reality of standing inside it — is something collectors understand intimately. A watch that photographs well and wears poorly is not a good watch. A resort that photographs beautifully and executes indifferently is not a luxury resort. It’s a luxury price tag on something that hasn’t yet earned the designation.

Chrissy deserved better. So did the anniversary. So did the $2,000.

Bezels & Bourbon covers watches, bourbon, and the collector’s eye for value. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.

The coin has two sides.

Heads is the confession — the four Timex Expeditions, the $13 Casio that has never once been wrong, the Movado Bold Verso from TJ Maxx. The joy that got here first, before the vocabulary and the strategy and the spreadsheet. If you haven’t read it, start there. It’s the honest account of how a collection actually begins.

This is the other side.

This is the roadmap.

The Moment It Changed

My twin sons, Jansen and Vaughan, turned 18 in 2025. I wanted to give them something worth having — something that would mean more the older they got, the way the right objects always do. I bought them each a Citizen Eco-Drive, had them engraved, and tracked the delivery the way you track a flight you’re actually nervous about.

They arrived at 38mm.

That’s when I discovered I had an opinion I didn’t know I had. I didn’t have the vocabulary yet to name what I was feeling — I just knew something was off. 38mm sat differently than I’d imagined it. I started researching. And then, on their birthday, I found three Citizen Promaster Airs on Costco same-day delivery.

I bought all three.

One for Jansen. One for Vaughan. One for me.

That Costco cart, checked out on the morning of my sons’ eighteenth birthday, is the origin story of the collection I’m actually building — the one with intention behind it. The joy came first. The architecture came out of that cart.

—

Three Collections, One Rule

I’m building three collections simultaneously.

Mine. Jansen’s. Vaughan’s.

The twins’ collections aren’t held for some distant inheritance moment. They’re being built in real time, year by year — a birthday, a Christmas, a graduation. They’ll watch their own collections grow. Whether they appreciate that effort right now is genuinely unclear to me. Probably not the way I do. But they won’t have to wait a lifetime to know it exists. The collection is already theirs. It’s just still arriving.

I buy ahead. I always have. There’s a savings account for Christmas presents, another for birthdays, others for the occasions that come around reliably if you’re paying attention. The monthly deposits run in the background the same way the watch roadmap runs in the background — not urgent, not dramatic, just consistent. When the right piece presents itself, the money is already there. The Glycines I purchased this past March are a good example. One is mine. The others have destinations I’m not ready to name yet. The timing isn’t right and the stories aren’t mine to tell until the moments that earn them actually arrive.

There is one rule governing all three collections, and it is non-negotiable.

No duplicates.

Not the same watch twice across any of the three collections. Brands will cross — that’s unavoidable over a roadmap that runs decades. But the same reference, the same dial, the same watch on two different wrists — that never happens. The reason is straightforward: when my collection eventually passes to the boys, and when the collections I’m building for others eventually reach their wrists, I want every watch to arrive as something genuinely new to the person receiving it. No duplicates means no diminished moments. Every piece lands for the first time.

Three collections. Three completely distinct worlds. Built simultaneously, designed never to overlap.

—

The Same Tone, Two Different Lives

Earlier this year, a TikTok promo link took me to Jomashop at the wrong hour of the night. I bought four Glycines in one session. One is mine — the Airman Vintage The Chief, GL0308, PVD over stainless in a bronze tone, blue dial, GMT. The others have their own stories. Those stories will tell themselves when the time is right.

Two of the four share something: the same bronze-tone PVD finish, the same starting aesthetic. PVD over stainless is durable, precise, consistent — the coating will wear at its own pace on each wrist, picking up the small records of daily life at the edges and high points. Not reactive chemistry. Just honest use.

Two watches, same starting point. Two different lives ahead of them. In five years they’ll carry the marks of whatever those lives involved. That’s not a material property. That’s just time doing what time does.

Mine is already on the wrist, quietly doing its thing. No ceremony, no unboxing yet — just the first few days of a story that will take years to tell. The other is in a box the recipient doesn’t know exists. By the time it reaches that wrist, mine will have a small head start. That gap will close. Then they’ll each go their own way.

—

The Spreadsheet

There is a spreadsheet. Of course there’s a spreadsheet. There is always a spreadsheet.

It started in October 2025 as something more urgent than a catalog. I needed to know what I’d spent. The collecting instinct had been running quietly — sometimes dormant, sometimes not — for twenty years, and I’d never once added it up. I needed the purchases centralized, dated, totaled. I needed to see the full picture of what I’d actually committed to before I committed to anything else.

The number, across all three collections, is $197,000. And climbing.

Some of the growth is built into the roadmap — price increases between now and 2055 are predictable and largely out of my hands. But the more honest reason it will grow is that the framework was never designed to be airtight. It was designed to be the floor. The right piece at the right moment still gets through — the MoonSwatch, the Citizen TSUYOSA x seconde/seconde, a $62 Norello with the words “Who Cares I’m Already Late” on the dial. That last one needed no further justification. Some watches earn their place on personality alone.

Twenty-plus iterations later, the spreadsheet is something else entirely. It has a matrix now — every watch category mapped against every price tier, from scrap to grail. Individual sheets for Jansen and Vaughan, rule-compliant and movement-verified. A master tracking list for brands worth watching. A no-go list. And a strategic roadmap — a multi-decade brief for my authorized dealer, with budget ranges, notes to pass to the sales associate, and a stated relationship goal for each visit. The first visit is in 2027. The last is in 2055.

The rules themselves have evolved. What started as a blunt geographic filter has been refined into something more honest. The spirit of the rule was never about geography. It was never purely about movement standards either. At its core, the framework exists to answer one question: will this object last a lifetime? The enemy isn’t a particular country of origin. It’s planned obsolescence — the deliberate engineering of things that need to be replaced, upgraded, discarded. Every rule in the framework, read in that light, is the same rule stated differently. Buy things built to endure. Avoid things built not to.

The roadmap didn’t spring from ambition. It evolved from understanding. Each iteration reflected something I’d learned — about movements, about brand architecture, about how the authorized dealer relationship actually works at the level where the watches I want to own become available. You don’t just walk in and buy a Submariner. You build a history. You show up consistently. You make purchases that signal you’re a serious person with a long horizon. The spreadsheet became the instrument for thinking that through — not just what to buy, but when, from whom, and what message each purchase sends to the person across the counter.

It started as a ledger. It became a life plan. That’s what happens when you pay attention long enough.

—

What I Learned From the $13 Casio

There is a $13 Casio in my collection that has been keeping perfect time for nearly a decade without a battery change, without an adjustment, without being asked to try. It is uncomfortable to wear. It is, honestly, not attractive. I almost never take it out of the box.

I’ve thought about what that watch teaches me more than is probably warranted.

What it teaches me is this: price is not the variable. Price is one variable. What you’re actually buying when you buy a watch — or anything made with real craft — is a set of decisions someone made about what mattered. The $13 Casio’s maker decided accuracy mattered, comfort less so. A Patek’s maker decides that everything matters, at a cost that reflects the decision to leave nothing on the table. Both are coherent. Both are honest. The roadmap I’m building moves through every price tier not to graduate from the cheaper pieces but to understand the full vocabulary of those decisions.

The Bulova I bought at 27 because I wanted to look like someone who had his life together is now heading in for its first service. It still runs perfectly. That feels like something — a watch that was purchased for the wrong reasons outlasting the wrong reasons and becoming, eventually, the right one.

And then there’s the Movado Bold Verso from TJ Maxx. I knew exactly what it was when I picked it up. A fashion watch. A rules violation. I bought it anyway — not because the impulse overwhelmed the framework, but because the framework had a gap. Gold case watches below $10,000 that meet my acquisition standards don’t exist yet. The Movado doesn’t pretend to fill that gap permanently. It holds the aesthetic territory until something worthy comes along. That’s not a lapse in judgment. That’s judgment applied differently — knowing the difference between what a piece is and what role it’s playing, and being honest about both.

I don’t regret a single purchase. That’s the honest assessment. Not one. The $13 Casio and the Longines Year of the Horse and the TJ Maxx Movado all belong to the same collection because they all belong to the same person, and the same person made every one of those decisions with his whole chest.

—

The Architecture of a Collection

Twenty-four years in construction taught me something about what endures. You can build fast and call it done, or you can build with attention to the things that won’t be visible once the walls are up — the joinery, the foundation, the decisions that no one will ever see but that determine whether the whole thing holds.

A collection is like that. The part people see is the watches. The part that matters is the reasoning — why this one and not that one, why now and not later, what you’re trying to understand by adding this piece at this point in the road. The architecture isn’t visible. But it’s what makes the collection coherent instead of just accumulated.

The roadmap ends in 2055. The last watch is a Patek Philippe Calatrava 5227J in yellow gold — a lifetime piece, purchased at the end of a very long road, from a family-owned manufacture that has never gone public and never compromised. Before it, at 70, there is a Breguet Marine in titanium. Abraham-Louis Breguet invented the tourbillon, the modern mainspring, the self-winding mechanism, the shock absorber. He is the reason watchmaking became what it is. Wearing a Breguet at 70 isn’t a grail purchase. It’s a debt paid in the most appropriate currency available.

Before that, at 66, there is a Blancpain Fifty Fathoms — the watch that invented the modern dive watch category, the piece every Submariner owes its existence to. One Rolex is enough. Two Rolexes in a collection that runs to 2055 is a plan. Three would start to look like brand loyalty rather than collecting breadth. There are too many significant houses that deserve representation to spend a fourth visit at the same counter.

I’m not building a collection to have one. I’m building it to have something to give. Two sons who are already watching their own collections grow, piece by piece, year by year — not knowing yet what it will mean when they’re old enough to understand what went into it. Others who don’t yet know what’s waiting for them. A roadmap that ends with a watch I will spend the next thirty years earning the right to understand.

That’s not a plan. That’s a life organized around craft and intention and the people who will still be around when the last piece comes in.

—

The coin landed on heads first. It always does.

The joy came before the roadmap. The spreadsheet started as a ledger — a man finally adding up twenty years of quiet accumulation and needing to see the number. What came out the other side was a framework, a matrix, a multi-decade AD brief, and a specific reference in yellow gold at the end of a very long road.

October 2025 to now. Twenty-plus iterations. $197,000 across three collections, and climbing.

I’ve been trying to write this piece for four weeks. Every time I thought it was finished, the understanding shifted — a revised rule, a clearer sense of why any of this matters, a watch that changed the shape of the roadmap. That’s not a flaw in the process. That’s the process. At some point you plant a flag and say: this is where I am today. My understanding of what I’m building, and why, is deeper than it was when I started. Weeks from now it will be deeper still.

I’m in no hurry. There’s a lot of road left, and the road is the point.

— Jaime

It started with judo.

1986. El Paso, Texas. My father was a Drill Instructor at Fort Bliss, which tells you everything you need to know about the household I was growing up in and nothing at all about what to do with a second-grader who had more energy than any reasonable adult knew how to manage. My parents found a local judo school. I earned a yellow belt. Then we moved to Virginia, and that was that.

Except it wasn’t.

The seed doesn’t care whether the conditions are right. It just waits.

—

Thirty years of motion followed. Soccer. Baseball. Basketball. Football. Track — senior captain, MVP, the kind of kid who needed something to run toward. Then adult life, which has its own momentum and its own way of burying things that aren’t urgent. Body Combat at a gym, eventually certified to teach it, because if I was going to do something I was going to understand it from the inside. And then, somewhere in my mid-thirties, the decision to become a better instructor led me to the closest dojang to my office.

I was a white belt. I knew nothing about ATA — the American Taekwondo Association — and less than nothing about the two people whose names were on the door.

That was twelve years ago. I’m still there.

—

Chief Master David and Chief Master Laura Kowkabany are 8th-degree black belts in an organization where 9th degree is Grand Master and the 10th — held by founder HU Lee, who has been gone for years — will never be awarded again. Both of them have been offered the 9th degree path. Both of them declined.

They have one school. In Tampa. Every class taught by their own hands — not delegated to a 4th or 5th degree while they oversee a franchise from a distance. In an organization where most 8th and 9th degrees run empires, the Chiefs run a dojang. They chose the mat over the institution, every time, for forty years. There is no other school in ATA directly taught by an 8th degree. There are two of them here.

I didn’t know any of that when I walked in as a white belt at thirty-six.

I just knew I wanted to learn.

—

Chief LK told me once that I move like a martial artist.

I have received awards. I have been recognized for things built and restored and competed for. I have had people say kind things about work I’ve done across twenty-four years in construction, across a career that has left physical marks on this city.

Nothing has landed the way those six words did.

Coming from someone who was once the highest-ranked woman in the ATA — who has spent four decades giving herself to this discipline, who chose one school and one community over everything the organization would have handed her — those six words were not a compliment. They were a verdict. Delivered quietly, the way she delivers everything, because the Chiefs have never needed volume to make a point land.

—

By 2018 I had earned my brown belt and entered my first tournament. Tallahassee. One day of competition against people who knew what they were doing in ways I was still learning to understand.

I was not good.

I want to be precise about that, because the instinct is to soften it — to say I held my own, or that it was a learning experience, or that the point was just to compete. All of that is true and none of it is the truth. The truth is I went to Tallahassee and I got a clear and unambiguous picture of exactly how much I didn’t yet know. I drove home with that picture and I studied it the whole way back.

That’s what losing is for, if you let it be.

2019. First-degree black belt. State champion in sparring, forms, and combat weapons — all three disciplines, same year.

I’m not going to dress that up. It happened because of one bad day in Tallahassee and everything I did with it between then and the moment I stepped back onto a tournament floor. The loss was the lesson. The championship was the proof that I’d actually learned it.

—

Twelve years in, I am the senior student at KFMA. Highest rank outside the Chiefs themselves. More than a full year ahead of the next person in the school.

What that actually looks like is five days a week. I take the 4:30 family class — mostly color belts, younger students. It’s a good warm-up for me and something else entirely for them: the chance to train alongside someone who has been doing this for twelve years. I provide instruction in forms and sparring combinations. Then we mix it up. Full contact, full protective padding. I go very lightly. That’s not generosity — that’s the only responsible option. But I’ve come to understand that going lightly against someone much more advanced is its own kind of education. They feel what good movement looks like before they can fully replicate it.

Monday and Wednesday at 5:15 is Master Club — the most advanced class in the school, the black belts, the ones who have stayed long enough to know what they don’t yet know. It is energetic. That’s the polite version.

Then the 6:30 class, daily, where I stand beside Chief DK and give instruction. I don’t participate in sparring or drills directly at that hour. I teach.

I also sit on the testing panel for lower ranks. I make notes. I give scores. I am notoriously a low scorer — not out of harshness, but because I’m out there on the mat every day. I know what the standard looks like from the inside. I know these students in ways the Chiefs sometimes don’t, because I’m the one going lightly with them at 4:30 while they figure out how to move. My expectations come from proximity, not distance. I think that’s the right place for them to come from.

—

Chief DK said something to me not long ago that I’ve turned over in my mind more than once since.

He said I was like a brother to him. That he considered the three of us — the two Chiefs, the senior student — closer than family.

From a man who turned down Grand Master. Who has one school and forty years on the mat and no interest in anything the organization would have handed him beyond the work itself. That’s not a thing you say casually. That’s a thing you say when you mean it.

I’m working toward my fourth degree. Seven midterm testings completed, one left later this month, final testing in December. In ATA, rank accumulates slowly by design — fourth degree requires four years in rank, third required three, and so on. The time is the point. You can’t shortcut what you haven’t yet lived. After that, the Legacy program, certification, the path to becoming an instructor in the way the Chiefs are instructors — not just someone who teaches, but someone qualified to certify others.

That’s where this is going. That’s what twelve years on the mat looks like when it compounds.

—

Every year, around Christmas, I gather what I can from the students and parents. A little over two thousand dollars, usually. I choose the gifts for the school — new vegan leather chairs for the parent section two years ago, a real upgrade — and I choose the personal gifts for the Chiefs.

For Chief David: bourbon. Military history. Philosophy. A man who has spent forty years studying how human beings move and think and break and endure has predictable taste in what he reads, and it’s not predictable in a small way.

For Chief Laura: candles, soap, and books — feminine leadership, spiritual texts, the kind of reading that builds something inward as steadily as the mat builds something outward. The candles and soap carry their own tradition — a gift that gives itself away in the using. Every time you light the candle, you lose a little of it. Every time you use the soap, it diminishes. To give someone a candle is to give them something that asks to be consumed in the act of being received. Forty years of martial arts. Forty years of giving herself away in exactly that way, class after class, student after student, one school, no empire.

The gift matches the person. That’s the only standard worth applying.

I’ve been choosing these gifts for years now. Since the previous senior student left and that responsibility found me, the way most of the right responsibilities eventually do — not assigned, just inherited by the person who was already paying attention.

—

The Chiefs are forty-plus year martial artists. Both of them are proficient in numerous weapons. We train knife defense drills at KFMA. Knives go with who they are — not as accessories, but as extensions of a discipline that has always understood the blade as a subject worth studying seriously.

In 2024, at Christmas, they gave me a Gerber Ultimate Fixed Blade. Four point eight inches of high carbon stainless, textured rubber grip, and a sheath built to keep you alive — fire starter, whistle, diamond sharpener, everything you need to not be finished by whatever the moment throws at you.

In 2025, they gave me a SOG Sogfari Kukri. Twelve inches of blade. Eighteen inches overall. A sawback spine, a spiked tang for pounding, a knife built not for surviving in place but for moving through — clearing the path, making passage where there wasn’t one before.

Both years. Both Chiefs. Jointly, privately — the two of them and the three third-degrees, no audience beyond the people who had earned the right to be in the room.

I don’t know if they planned the progression. I’ve never asked. But the story those two knives tell in sequence is not a subtle one. Year one: here is what you need to survive. Year two: here is what you need to advance.

That’s not a gift strategy. That’s a philosophy. And it comes from two people who have been teaching philosophy on a mat in Tampa for forty years, whether they call it that or not.

—

I didn’t set out to collect knives. I don’t think I would have arrived at it on my own, at least not yet.

But I know what happens when something enters my life with real provenance behind it. It happened with watches — one Bulova at twenty-seven, and then years later a door I couldn’t stop walking through. It happened with bourbon, with records, with shoes. The collecting instinct doesn’t announce itself. It waits for an object that carries enough weight to wake it up.

The Gerber woke it up. The SOG confirmed it.

They’re on the green felt mat in my study now — next to the loupe and the strap tools and the bourbon glass in the corner of the frame. Objects that came from two people who spent forty years becoming exactly who they are, given to a student who spent twelve years paying attention.

A new collection starts where the last one did: with a gift that meant something, from someone who knew what they were handing over.

I didn’t walk into that dojang in 2014 knowing any of this was coming.

The seed doesn’t tell you what it’s going to grow into. It just waits for you to show up and stay.

—

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

I have a rule about history.

Not a written rule — more of an instinct that’s hardened into policy over the years. If an object has a real story behind it, a story that predates the marketing department and the lifestyle photography and the carefully worded press release, it gets a serious look. If it doesn’t, it has to work twice as hard to earn a place in my collection.

The Glycine Airman has a real story.

Glycine was founded in 1914 in Biel, Switzerland — the same city that would later become the heartbeat of the Swiss watch industry. They weren’t building collector’s pieces. They were building tools. Precise, honest, built to a purpose. In 1953 they introduced the Airman, and that watch wasn’t designed for the window of a boutique on Fifth Avenue. It was designed for the cockpit.

Here’s the revised provenance section. Everything else in the piece stays the same — just this block changes:

The Airman has earned its provenance before it earned mine. Glycine introduced the Airman in 1953, and they didn’t do it alone — the watch was designed in full consultation with the U.S. Air Force and sold at exchange stores on military bases. The GMT function wasn’t a collector’s complication in 1953. It was infrastructure. Built so servicemen could know the time at home and the time on the ground simultaneously. The watch existed because people needed it to exist.

It went from the cockpit to the cosmos. Astronaut Pete Conrad wore his Airman on the 1965 Gemini 5 spaceflight, then wore it again for Gemini 11 in 1966. That second mission featured an open-cockpit design — which means Conrad’s wrist was exposed to outer space during his colleague’s two-hour-and-forty-one-minute spacewalk. The Airman became the first automatic watch ever flown in and exposed to outer space. Not because Glycine paid anyone to wear it. Because Pete Conrad already owned one.

The Glycine Airman Vintage The Chief — GL0308, PVD over stainless, blue dial, GMT — came out of the box on the green mat in my study the way watches with genuine history always do. Quietly. Without needing to perform. The loupe to the left, the bourbon glass in the corner of the frame, and a watch that already knew what it was before I put it on.

The blue dial against the dark case is a considered thing. It shifts depending on the light — purposeful indoors, something else entirely when the sun catches it. The GMT hand sits at its second time zone, ready, patient, doing exactly what it was built to do seventy-three years before I bought it.

I’ve been learning its moods. It’s a good student of mine so far.

Here’s something I don’t say often enough in this publication: I didn’t just buy one Glycine.

I bought four.

I’m not going to tell you who the others are for. Not yet. The timing isn’t right and the stories aren’t mine to tell until the moments that earn them actually arrive. But I’ll say this — the decision to build around a single brand for the people who matter most to you is its own kind of philosophy. It’s not about the logo. It’s about saying: I thought about you specifically, and this is what I came up with.

The Chief is mine. The rest of the story writes itself later.

There’s a version of watch collecting that’s purely about the object — the movement, the case diameter, the bracelet finishing, the resale trajectory. That version is legitimate. It’s just not mine.

Mine starts with the question: what did this come from? Who needed it first, and why? What problem was it built to solve before it became something someone like me would put on a green felt mat and photograph next to a bourbon glass?

If the answer is interesting, I’m already halfway there.

Glycine’s answer is interesting. A 1914 Swiss manufacture that put a GMT complication on the wrists of working pilots before GMT complications were a conversation piece. That’s not a story I manufactured to justify a purchase. That’s a story that was already there, waiting for someone to notice it.

I noticed it.

The Chief is on my wrist as I write this. The GMT hand is keeping its quiet counsel on a second time zone I haven’t visited yet but might. The dial is doing its thing with the light.

Somewhere in this house, three more Glycines are waiting.

They don’t know where they’re going yet. But I do.

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

On December 21st, I placed an order for a pair of shoes and was told to expect them sometime in March. I said fine. I had no idea yet what I was agreeing to. These shoes did not exist. They would be made for me, specifically, once I asked for them.

That’s not the way most people buy shoes. Most people need shoes, find shoes, and shoes arrive. The whole transaction takes forty-eight hours if you’re patient. I committed to a three-month wait for something that didn’t exist yet — leather not yet chosen, pieces not yet cut, artisans in Colombia not yet aware that a man in Florida was waiting for what they were about to build.

A few days after I ordered, I received an email from a production manager named John. Not an automated confirmation. An introduction. He told me the leather was being chosen. That it came from a Gold-rated Italian tannery — a designation that signals environmental responsibility, ethical labor, and a commitment to materials that outlast the transaction. He told me his team had devoted decades to this craft and that they would send updates every two weeks while my shoes were being made.

I’d ordered shoes the way you commission something. I just hadn’t fully understood that yet.

—

The Supper Club Had a Calendar Before It Had a Purpose

On December 14th — one week before I ordered the shoes — I formed the Supper Club. A curated dining group of eight friends. The concept was clear: gather intentionally, eat well, be present. What we didn’t have yet was a first reservation. That came on January 28th. Rocca. A modern Italian restaurant that earns its entrance photo, which is saying something.

Rocca and the shoes found each other naturally, the way the right things tend to. I wasn’t planning to debut the Valencias there — I just looked at the reservation and thought, yes. That’s the occasion. It wasn’t engineered. It was instinct.

The shoes didn’t make it. The artisans were still working. I stood in front of Rocca in my Stacy Adams Finnegan Wingtip boots — a perfectly good shoe, a shoe that had never once let me down — and the Valencias were somewhere in Colombia being finished.

That’s when I understood something. The Stacy Adams are a good shoe. The Valencias are a different conversation. Not better in the way that’s about price. Better in the way that’s about intention. I’d been wearing fine. I’d decided fine wasn’t enough.

—

What Arrived in April

The Beckett Simonon Valencia Wholecuts arrived in black. Blake-stitched. Gold-rated Italian leather. Made by hand in Colombia by people who have spent their careers doing exactly this.

They are stunningly simple. That’s the first thing. No broguing. No cap toe. No medallion or contrast stitching or detail asking for your attention. Just a clean, unbroken line from heel to toe, an eggshell finish with almost no sheen — flat, quiet, completely sure of itself — and leather that feels like it already knows what it’s supposed to become.

The Blake stitch matters here. A Goodyear welt shoe is built with a welt — a strip of leather that runs around the perimeter and connects the upper to the sole, allowing resoling, adding structure, creating the characteristic silhouette of a traditional dress shoe. Durable, classic, repairable. The gold standard for a long time and still excellent.

A Blake-stitched shoe stitches the insole directly to the outsole in a single pass. The result is a shoe that sits closer to the ground, with a cleaner profile — no welt breaking the line of the silhouette. More flexible. More refined in appearance. The tradeoff is that resoling requires a specialized machine and a skilled cobbler. You’re not maintaining these at any corner shop.

I chose Blake stitch because I wanted the shoe to disappear. I wanted nothing competing with the line. And when they came out of the box, that’s exactly what I got. A shoe that announces nothing and means everything.

—

The Fear

I am almost afraid to wear them.

That’s the honest thing. They are the most expensive shoes I own. They are also the most understated. And somewhere in that combination lives a reluctance I didn’t expect — the instinct to protect something by not using it, to preserve quality by keeping it in the box, to honor the craftsmanship by never exposing it to the world that might scratch it.

That instinct is wrong. I know it’s wrong because I believe the opposite about everything else in this life I’m building. A watch you don’t wear isn’t keeping time for anyone. A record you don’t play is just plastic in a sleeve. A shoe you never put on a floor isn’t craftsmanship — it’s a display.

Quality isn’t preserved by protection. It’s honored by choosing carefully when and where you show up.

—

Driftlight Is the Answer

The Supper Club’s third dinner is at Driftlight Steakhouse. That’s where the Valencias will walk for the first time. Not because I planned it that way — I didn’t. But because when I looked at the calendar and looked at the shoes, the answer was obvious. Driftlight is the occasion that was always supposed to be waiting.

I’ve been moving deliberately toward a different kind of ownership. Not acquisition for its own sake, not luxury as a signal, but things built to last — objects that reward use rather than punish it, that develop character rather than just wear down. The watches. The pens. The vinyl. And now this.

A shoe made by hand in Colombia from Italian leather by artisans who’ve spent decades on this specific craft is not a shoe you protect. It’s a shoe you wear to the right dinner, with the right people, and let it begin the story it was built to tell.

Rocca didn’t get them. That’s fine. Rocca got the Stacy Adams and a table full of people who made it worth showing up in whatever was on my feet.

Driftlight gets the Valencias. And the Valencias have been waiting for exactly that.

—

December 21st. I ordered shoes that didn’t exist yet. John wrote to tell me the leather was being chosen. The Supper Club didn’t have a first reservation. Rocca wasn’t on the calendar. Driftlight wasn’t even a thought.

None of it was orchestrated. All of it arrived in the right order.

The anticipation was never about waiting for the shoes. It was about the life that was being built while they were.

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

I heard about Bridget Phetasy’s work the way I hear about most things these days — through the windshield, somewhere between a jobsite and home, a podcast playing through the speakers while Florida moved past me at seventy miles an hour.

The podcast mentioned her piece on chasing youth. On the particular cultural obsession with being cool in the eyes of people younger than you. On what we sacrifice — what we actually trade away — in pursuit of relevance to a generation that isn’t ours and never will be.

I didn’t pull over. But I wanted to.

—

I was never the cool kid. I want to say that plainly, without apology or performance. I didn’t have a rebellion in my twenties. I didn’t have a movement or a manifesto. The Boomers had the counterculture. Millennials had the internet. Gen Z has the algorithm. Gen X — my generation — mostly just showed up, kept their heads down, and got on with it. We were the latchkey kids who learned early not to expect too much of any particular moment.

What I didn’t understand then, and what I’m only beginning to understand now, is that maybe the absence of a rebellion was its own kind of preparation. Maybe we were just waiting until we had something worth defending.

—

I’m going to be fifty in a few years. And something has shifted.

Not a crisis — I want to be clear about that. No sports car, no desperate reach backward toward something I never had. What’s shifted is quieter than that, and more permanent. I’ve started choosing things that require something from me. Not things that are easy or fast or optimized for frictionless consumption. Things that push back.

A record that doesn’t have a skip button. You put the needle down, and you hear the album the way the artist intended it — beginning, middle, end. The silence between tracks is part of the record. The B-side exists for a reason. You can’t algorithm your way to the good part because the good part is the whole thing.

A bourbon that took twelve years to make. Twelve years in an oak barrel while the world moved on without it, drawing flavor from wood and time and chemistry that no shortcut can replicate. When I pour a glass, I’m not just drinking. I’m accounting for those twelve years. That accounting is the point.

A cigar that takes ninety minutes to finish. You cannot rush it. The draw, the ash, the slow burn — it sets its own pace, and yours becomes secondary. Every conversation I’ve had over a cigar has been better than it would have been otherwise, because the cigar forced us to slow down long enough to have it.

A watch wound by hand each morning. A pen filled from a bottle of ink. Books — physical ones, with spines that crack and pages that yellow — read in a study I built deliberately from a room that used to hold nothing but boxes and unfinished business.

—

The Complication

I am aware of the irony. I share these thoughts on TikTok.

Here’s how I think about that: TikTok is the handshake. Sixty seconds to stop the scroll, offer something real, and point toward the door. The door opens here — on Substack, in long form, where every word is chosen, and the reader has to actually stay. The short-form platform exists in service of the long-form work, not the other way around. The moment that inverts, the whole thing collapses.

I’m not anti-technology. I’m anti-surrender. There’s a difference.

I don’t always get it right. There’s a seven-second video on my feed — a beach, a wrist roll, a watch I genuinely believe in — that I’m not proud of. No context. No door. Just the aesthetic of the thing, floating free of any meaning. Watch porn, if we’re being honest, and not even a good one. The platform was there, the path of least resistance was short, and I took it. The scroll won that round.

I’m telling you that because the rebellion isn’t total. The current is real, and sometimes you’re in it before you notice.

—

Maybe This Is Our Rebellion

I keep turning this over. The generational angle. Whether what I’m doing — what some of us are doing — constitutes something larger than personal preference.

The attention span data is real. Something happened during the lockdowns, in those long months of micro-media and infinite scroll, and it didn’t fully reverse when the world reopened. The average is down. The tolerance for anything that takes longer than ninety seconds to deliver its payload has narrowed. The culture optimized for engagement and got fragmentation. That’s not an accident. That’s a design outcome.

And I wonder if the response — the intentional, deliberate, almost ornery insistence on things that take time — is specifically a Gen X response. Not because we’re nostalgic. Not because we’re luddites. But because we grew up without the internet, learned to sit with ourselves, and never fully forgot how. The muscle is still there. It just needed a reason to flex.

I have a roadmap for watch acquisitions that runs to 2046. Pens I’ve mapped out through 2053. A bourbon collection built around age statements and patience. Twin sons — Jansen and Vaughan — for whom I’m assembling a parallel collection, piece by piece, year by year, for a version of them that doesn’t exist yet. These aren’t objects. They’re commitments. They’re the physical record of a life being lived on purpose.

That feels, to me, like something worth calling a rebellion. Not a loud one. Not a manifesto-and-march one. The quiet kind. The kind that doesn’t announce itself, just builds — watch by watch, record by record, glass by glass — until one day you look around the room and realize you built something that required your full attention, and it gave you the same in return.

—

I’m not chasing cool. I gave that up somewhere on a Florida highway listening to a podcast, and I haven’t missed it once.

I’m chasing depth. I’m chasing the specific satisfaction of things that couldn’t have been rushed. I’m chasing the version of myself that exists at the end of a ninety-minute cigar, when the conversation has gone somewhere it wouldn’t have gone in fifteen minutes.

The watches and the pens and the bourbon aren’t the subject. They never are. They’re the doors. And I’ve been walking through them, one at a time, for years now — slowly enough to actually see what’s on the other side.

The rebellion isn’t loud. It never was. It just refuses to skip ahead.

— Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

Twenty-four years on construction sites have taught me one truth: a blueprint is just a polite suggestion until the dirt starts moving. You can plan for luxury, pay for the promise of a place like the Sheraton Brandon, and still find yourself standing in a dim hallway at midnight with a $439 room key, no working coffee shop, and a TV remote that doesn’t exist. When the foundation fails, you don’t sulk—you pivot.

That’s exactly what Chrissy and I did. We left the overgrown landscaping behind and went looking for the Saturday night we actually wanted. What started as a loose idea became something sharper: the Supper Club. Not just dinner. A deliberate ritual of intentional abundance.

We landed at Rocca Tampa. After the sterile disappointment of the hotel, walking into that room felt like arriving somewhere earned. Our server, Jayden, didn’t just recite specials—he told us the story of the building and the chef’s Michelin-starred path. You could feel the shift the moment we sat down.

We’d planned for eight. Two couldn’t make it. That left six of us around the table: Janet and Joe dressed to the nines, Chris and Julia sliding in just behind them, Chrissy and me anchoring one end. The energy was already humming before the first drink arrived.

The real door to the evening was the Mozzarella Cart. I’ve watched crews pour concrete and set steel with exacting precision for decades, but there’s something different about watching fresh mozzarella pulled and shaped tableside, right at your elbow. It was theater and craft at once. For a few minutes, the six of us simply watched and talked as that cheese became dinner. That shared moment of care is what I wanted the Supper Club to be.

On my left wrist sat my Longines Master Collection Year of the Horse—the deep red lacquer dial marking my birth year. A serious watch, yet no one mentioned it. Jayden didn’t notice. My friends didn’t comment. That quiet anonymity pleased me. It wasn’t there to impress the room. It was a private reminder of precision on a night that had begun with things falling apart.

The next day, that search for precision continued at Montblanc. I spent forty-five minutes talking with Andrew, who showed me a rugged $25,000 mountaineering watch before turning to the pens. I’ve used good pens before. These were something else entirely—weighty, smooth, almost hovering above the paper with no drag, no resistance. Just pure glide. They made me want to sit down and actually write something worth keeping.

By the time the bill came—$806.82 for the dry-aged Rohan duck, the Bistecca, and the pastas we shared—the Supper Club had already become more than a meal. It was proof that you can build a small, deliberate pocket of richness even when the larger day tries to disappoint.

Later that weekend, between bars of soap and dodging imposter colognes at a thrift store, I found three Connie Francis vinyl records for two dollars each. A $3,600 Longines at a Michelin-starred table. Two-dollar records on a dusty shelf. To some, that looks like a contradiction. To me, it’s the only honest way to live.

You build the room. You pull up the chair. You pay attention to the details that endure.

The needle is already down. Rocca was the occasion. The ritual is the life.

— Jaime