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

The first time I thought I was there was when I bought four Waterford Crystal bourbon glasses.

Not two. Four. The whole set. An act of commitment dressed up as a purchase — though I didn’t know it in those terms yet. I just knew that Waterford meant something. I’d known that since I was a kid.

You hear a name a certain way when you’re young and it lodges itself somewhere permanent. Waterford Crystal was that name for me. The way adults said it — careful, almost reverent — told you everything. That was for other people. People who had arrived somewhere. People with a different kind of life than the one currently in progress.

So I filed it. Under someday. Right next to a hundred other things I didn’t know I was waiting for.

Someday came quietly. No ceremony. No announcement. Just a shelf in a store and a decision that felt smaller in the moment than it apparently was. I brought them home, set them on the counter, and felt something I couldn’t quite name — a soft closing of a distance I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying.

I thought I was finishing something.

Because the glasses led somewhere. They always do. You buy the right vessel and it asks to be filled with the right thing. And the right thing — Woodford, Angel’s Envy, a good Rye on a slow night — asks to be understood. And understanding asks for more. A vocabulary. A history. A framework for tasting, for comparing, for the particular pleasure of knowing what you’re drinking and why it matters.

And then that opened another door. And then another.

Bourbon led to the ritual of the evening. The ritual led to vinyl on the turntable and a book in the chair and a cigar on the porch. The objects started talking to each other — the glass, the record, the watch on the wrist keeping honest time through all of it. I wasn’t just collecting things. I was building a life with texture. A life you could feel in your hands.

Which eventually led here. To a publication about all of it. To the idea that the objects themselves aren’t the point — that they’re doors, every one of them, and what matters is where they take you if you’re paying attention.

I’m drinking Woodford Reserve Double Oaked out of those glasses tonight. Double-barreled. Extra time in the wood. Deeper, richer, a little more of everything the first barrel started.

I think about that kid sometimes — the one who heard the name Waterford and quietly filed it away. He thought those glasses belonged to a different kind of life. He had no idea they’d be the most ordinary thing in his evening one day. No idea they’d be sitting on a table next to a turntable and a green felt watch mat and a shelf full of books he’s actually read.

He didn’t know the glasses weren’t the destination.

—Jaime

Not online. Not at a boutique. Not from an authorized dealer where someone in a pressed shirt walks you through the provenance and hands you a velvet-lined box. At TJ Maxx. Between the discounted luggage and a rack of irregular khakis. I picked it up off the shelf, turned it over in my hand, felt the weight of the gold-on-gold case, and thought — yes. That’s mine.

I also have a 40-year plan to buy a Patek Philippe.

Both things are true at the same time, and I’ve stopped pretending one cancels out the other.

—

The honest story of this collection doesn’t start at a white-glove AD or with a lifelong obsession carefully tended from childhood. It starts the way most real things start — sideways, without warning, and at slightly the wrong moment.

I was 27, newly married, and I bought a Bulova chronograph because I wanted to look like someone who had his life together. That’s the whole story. There was no deeper rationale. I wanted a watch that said something about me before I had fully figured out what that was. Twenty years later, it’s heading in for its first service — new seals, a polish, the kind of attention a watch earns after two decades of keeping quiet and keeping time. It still runs perfectly. That feels important somehow.

The Seiko came next, on my honeymoon. A cruise ship somewhere between Florida and the Bahamas, the kind of gift shop that exists in the space between one world and another. I bought it because I was happy and it was there and it caught the light in a way that felt like the right moment to own something. I have never once regretted that purchase. Some watches are complications and movements and case diameters. That Seiko is a Tuesday in the Bahamas when everything was exactly right.

Then came a Kenneth Cole Reaction digital — and I want to be honest about why. I was deep into everything Kenneth Cole at the time. The brand, the aesthetic, the particular shade of early-2000s cool it represented. The watch wasn’t a watch decision as much as it was a style decision, which is its own kind of collecting logic even if I didn’t know that yet.

The one that surprised me most, looking back, was a skeleton automatic I found on eBay in 2008. A Markus Ruby Calendarium. Sixty-one dollars. The first automatic I’d ever owned, and the first skeleton I’d ever seen. I remember looking at it and thinking — you can see the whole thing working. Every gear, every wheel, every beat of the movement visible through the dial. I had no idea a watch could do that. That $61 eBay watch opened a door I’ve never closed.

Then life moved the way life does. A decade passed. A Fossil Relic for $45. A Casio world timer. And then a vintage Casio for $13 that I feel compelled to tell you about specifically.

It is, without question, the most uncomfortable watch I own. The case sits wrong on the wrist. The bracelet is unforgiving in a way that suggests Casio was not especially concerned with comfort in that era. It is also, honestly, pretty ugly. I read somewhere years ago that the battery lasts fifteen years. That has turned out to be true. I have never replaced it. I have never adjusted it. I rarely let it out of the watch box.

It is the most accurate timepiece in my entire collection. Still. To this day. Unchanged.

I have a 40-year plan to buy a Patek Philippe. I own a $13 Casio that has been right about the time every single day for nearly a decade without anyone asking it to try. I think about that more than is probably warranted.

I don’t regret a single one.

—

Something shifted in 2025. I’m not sure I can point to a single moment — it was more like a pressure that had been building quietly for years finally finding a direction. I started paying attention differently. Not just to watches I was buying, but to the watches I wanted. The ones I kept coming back to. The ones that made me stop scrolling.

I bought a couple of Timex Expeditions from Amazon. Then two Casios in the same week. None of it was premeditated. I was just a man in his late forties who had finally admitted to himself that he loved watches and had given himself permission to act on it.

The Timex Tide came next. A tide-temp-compass watch — practical, a little technical, interesting in a way I found quietly satisfying. I ordered it from Timex.com. It’s still on pre-order. Still making its way to me. It hasn’t arrived yet.

The irony of that is not lost on me. The watch that quietly started everything is the last one to the party.

—

In the space of about four weeks, I bought sixteen watches.

A Longines Master Collection — Year of the Horse, limited edition, the year of my birth pressed into the dial — from Tourneau. An Oceaneva 6000m deep diver in Grade 5 titanium that descends to depths no sensible living thing should visit. A Citizen TSUYOSA limited edition. A numbered NSB Apollo NFT piece. A Stewart Dawson military green that arrived through Watch Gang like a pleasant ambush. A Swatch Mission to Earthphase in Moonshine Gold that I will wear with a suit and precisely zero apologies. Two more Timex Expeditions from Walmart on a Saturday afternoon, because four is better than two and two had clearly not been enough. And yesterday — the Movado.

—

Then there were the two watches from Timex ReWound.

Timex ReWound is a take-back program. Customers send their used watches back to Timex at no cost — free shipping label, drop it in the mail, done. Timex receives them, cleans and restores the ones that still have life in them, and puts them back up for sale. The ones that don’t qualify get ground down and recycled into materials for new products. Nothing wasted. Everything given another chance, or allowed to become part of something else entirely.

I bought two automatics that looked interesting — possibly vintage, definitely worth having. What I didn’t fully reckon with until after I’d ordered them is that these watches belonged to someone else first. Someone wore them, lived in them, and then sent them back. I don’t know whose wrists they came from. I don’t know what they saw or why they were returned. They’re still in transit. I won’t know exactly what I’ve got until I open the box.

I find I don’t mind that at all. A watch with a previous life is a watch with a story I’m only getting the second chapter of.

The price range across those four weeks runs from $48 to $3,638. The locations run from Walmart to an authorized Longines dealer to a discount retailer to Timex’s own website. Every single one of them was purchased because something in me said — yes. That one. Now.

—

I have twin sons — Jansen and Vaughan, both 18, about to graduate high school and start their own journey. I’m building something for them that was never built for me. I don’t know if they appreciate watches right now — probably not the way I do. But I’d imagine one day they will. At some point in life, everyone needs a good watch. And when that moment comes for them, I want them to already have an overflowing collection to choose from. They don’t know it yet. That’s fine. I’m building it anyway.

—

There is a roadmap. There is a strategy. There is a plan that runs longer than I’m going to tell you about here, because that’s a different article — the other side of this coin.

But the roadmap didn’t come first. The joy came first. The Bulova at 27 and the Seiko on a cruise ship and the $13 Casio and the four Timex Expeditions and the Movado Bold Verso on a Saturday afternoon between the luggage and the khakis — all of that came first, and all of it is real, and none of it is something I have any interest in apologizing for.

The collection I’m building isn’t the collection I was supposed to build. It’s messier than that, and more human, and considerably more fun.

The Timex Tide is still in transit. Everything else got here first.

-Jaime

It was still in the box when I scanned it. Not because the instructions said to — there were no instructions, really. Just a small panel on the caseback, and etched into the steel itself, permanent and unremarkable as a serial number, a QR code.

I was doing research. Microbrands, specifically — the small independent watchmakers working outside the cathedral walls of Swiss horology, building interesting things for people who pay attention. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. That’s usually how the best finds work.

The NSB Apollo stopped me. 39mm. White dial with a guilloché center — that intricate diamond-pattern texture that catches light differently depending on where you’re standing. Blued hands. Roman numerals with Swiss lume. An NH35A automatic movement — a workhorse caliber with genuine horological pedigree — inside a 316L stainless steel case with a sapphire crystal. All of this for $270.

Then I read the rest. Limited edition. Fifty pieces. And on the second hand — a flying seagull.

NSB stands for New Smyrna Beach. Apollo Beach is right there — a stretch of Atlantic coastline about an hour from where I’m sitting right now. I’ve driven past it. The watch named for a beach I know, made fifty times, never to be made again.

I checked availability. One left.

At $270 and something genuinely singular, how do you say no?

—

I’ve spent 24 years in Florida construction. I’ve built the places people shop, eat, see their doctors. More recently, historical restoration work — buildings where the story of what something is and where it came from matters enormously. Where provenance isn’t an abstraction. It’s the difference between a detail that belongs and a detail that was invented.

Provenance in the watch world has always been a paper problem. A warranty card. A box. A receipt. Documents that sit in a drawer, fade, get lost in a move, burn in a house fire. When a watch changes hands, the paper trail is whatever the seller happens to have held onto. Authentication becomes archaeology — you’re reconstructing a history from fragments.

The Apollo’s approach is different in a way that I think most people in the watch world haven’t fully reckoned with yet.

Each watch comes with a unique NFT — a non-fungible token minted on the Polygon blockchain. The NFT holds the warranty papers, the authentication records, the certificate of ownership. And the QR code to access all of it isn’t on a card in the box. It’s laser-engraved into the caseback itself.

Think about what that means. The document cannot be separated from the object. The watch carries its own proof of existence. Permanently. In steel.

I’ve spent years on buildings where we had to argue about what was original and what was added later. I understand viscerally what it costs when the record is incomplete. A $270 microbrand from New Smyrna Beach just solved in stainless steel what auction houses and insurance companies spend fortunes trying to do with paper.

—

I’ve written before about the difference between a watch that arrived cold and a watch that was found. The grail purchased without a story behind it is a different object than the same watch stumbled onto while doing real research, at the end of a chain of curiosity that started somewhere else entirely.

This one was found. I wasn’t looking for it. I was paying attention, and it was there, and there was one left, and I recognized what I was looking at.

It’s on the wrist now. #11 of 50. Somewhere out there, forty-nine other people exist in the world who own the same object. I don’t know who they are. But unlike every limited edition watch that came before this one, the blockchain does. And whenever this watch moves — whether it stays in my collection for the next thirty years or finds its way to someone else’s wrist after I’m gone — the record moves with it.

Engraved in the steel. Permanent. Inseparable from the object itself.

The seagull on the second hand sweeps the dial. The bourbon is poured. The record is on.

Some evenings you pay attention, and the right thing finds you.

— Jaime

I was born in 1978. Year of the Horse.

I bought it because it was mine before I owned it. The Longines Master Collection Year of the Horse Edition — the L2.919.4.09.2, limited production, the most expensive piece in my collection. The right complication, the right dial, the right everything. A collector’s decision and a personal one, the same decision at the same moment. Pressed into lacquer, cased in steel, strapped to your wrist for whatever time you have left to wear it.

I just hadn’t given it anywhere to go yet. So I made a reservation, told Chrissy we were doing the Hard Rock, and put the watch on for the first time outside my own four walls.

It was a Saturday night. It was time.

The Entrance

The Seminole Hard Rock Tampa is a lot of things simultaneously — casino floor, concert venue, hotel, spectacle. It contains multitudes and several restaurants that have no business being as well-appointed as they are. Cipresso is the Italian one. It earns the entrance photo, which is saying something, because most places don’t.

We stood at the door because the door asked for it. The tile work, the marquee sign, the red carpet underfoot — it frames you before you’ve ordered anything. Chrissy in black and white stripes. Me in the houndstooth blazer. The Year of the Horse on my wrist.

Forty-eight years old. Twenty-four years in construction. A taekwondo black belt and a bourbon collection and a publication three weeks old. First time the watch left the house.

It needed a night. I went and built one.

The Room, The Drink, The Miss

Inside, Cipresso holds up. Green leather booths, black steel frames, lighting that makes everyone look like they made good decisions getting dressed. Our server was a genuinely nice guy — working a little too hard at being your friend, but not unpleasant. A minor note, easily forgiven.

The drinks were not minor.

I asked what bourbon they had and ordered an Old Fashioned. That’s how I met Yellowstone for the first time — not from my own bottle, which sits unopened in my collection, but from someone else’s bar, someone else’s pour. It was excellent. Warm, slightly sweet, the kind of bourbon that makes you wonder why you waited. I set my wrist on the table beside the glass and took the shot. Watch face catching the amber light, the drink beside it, the cherry-skewered garnish doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Nobody in the room said a word about the Longines.

Not the server. Not anyone at the surrounding tables. Not a single person across the entire evening acknowledged that I was wearing my birth year on my wrist for the first time in public.

I decided that was exactly right.

The food missed — my lobster ravioli arrived undercooked, the sauce thin and running to the rim, and Chrissy’s caprese was a generous and largely uneventful plate of tomatoes. The kitchen had an off night. It happens. A great room and a great bourbon is still a meal worth having. You don’t need everything to work. You need enough.

When in Rome

You cannot walk a casino floor with $50 in your pocket and not stop. It would be wrong. It would be a failure of imagination.

Neither of us gamble. That’s important context. We had no system, no loyalty to a particular machine, no plan beyond the vague understanding that this was the thing you do when you’re here. We wandered. Tried a few machines. Committed to nothing and everything simultaneously.

Chrissy doubled fast — fully and immediately, the way she approaches most things — and then four rounds later it was gone. The house always had it. We both knew that going in. I also doubled, then took the scenic route back down, slower and more methodical in my losing. I walked away ahead on the night.

Sixty-two dollars is somewhere. Possibly my jacket pocket. I haven’t looked. At this point it’s more interesting not knowing — the money that exists in theory, unverified, Schrödinger’s profit sitting in a cashout slip I may never find.

It was fun for exactly as long as it was fun. That’s the only correct relationship to have with a casino floor.

The Lucky Cigar

We’d been talking about cigars for a while. The way you mention something between two people and then life moves and the right moment never quite materializes. You need the right night, the right company, somewhere slow enough to earn it.

We didn’t buy off the shelf. We came prepared — a hand-rolled cigar from JDV Cigars, my local shop, carried in knowing exactly when it would be lit. The Lucky Cigar lounge sits just off the casino floor — semi-private, semi-quiet, a low enough roar to talk over and still hear the music from the overhead speakers. Red walls. Palm shadows moving across the plaster. The kind of light that makes an ordinary Saturday feel like a decision you made on purpose.

One cigar. Two people. A fresh old fashioned, simpler this time, orange peel in the glass. A yellow ashtray on the table between us.

Chrissy settled into her chair with the ease of someone who had been doing this for years, which she absolutely had not. That’s her specific gift — she’s a dabbler. Always down for anything at least once, then on to the next thing. She picks up new experiences like she already knows how they’re supposed to feel. I’ve learned to indulge those impulses. It’s one of the better decisions I make regularly.

We stayed about an hour. No agenda, no next thing pulling at us, nowhere the night needed to go. Just the cigar burning down slowly between us and the conversation going wherever it wanted. The kind of hour that doesn’t announce itself as significant while it’s happening.

When it was done, it was done. We went home.

What The Watch Was Actually For

I spent twenty-four years building things for other people — projects, timelines, structures that outlast the crews that raised them. Somewhere in there you learn the difference between what gets noticed and what endures. The watch wasn’t for the room. It was for the record. For the first page of something that’s just getting started.

The ravioli missed. The slots took Chrissy’s fifty dollars. The server tried a little too hard. None of that is the story.

The story is a 48-year-old man who builds things for a living finally building Saturday nights worth writing about — and a woman across the table who shows up in a striped dress with a cigar from a good shop and makes the whole thing feel like it was always going to happen exactly this way.

Some things just need the right occasion. Others need you to stop waiting and make one. The best nights need both.

Rocca is next. Chrissy will be there. So will the watch.

There are about two weeks a year in Florida when you can open everything.

No AC. No humidity pressing against the glass. Just sixty-something degrees and a breeze moving through the house the way air is supposed to move — freely, from one end to the other. Every window. Every door. It lasts maybe two weeks if you’re lucky, and then the heat comes back and you close it all up again until the following winter.

I wanted those french doors open.

There was a room standing between me and them. Not literally — there were sliding glass doors off the gym and the kitchenette that got to the pool just fine. I wasn’t blocked. I just couldn’t get that room open, and something about those two weeks of perfect air made that suddenly unacceptable.

So I looked at what was actually in there. A broken inversion table my parents gave me as a Christmas gift — still usable in a way, never fixed, never thrown out. Boxes of empty picture frames that had been waiting years for a purpose. Papers. Books that had drifted from other shelves. The kind of accumulation that happens not through carelessness but through motion — life moving fast enough that some things just land wherever they land and stay there.

I told myself I was clearing the room to open the doors.

That was true. It just wasn’t the whole truth.

The shelves were already there. So was the bookcase. They came with the house when I bought it in 2017 — left behind by a woman I never met. A widow. A grandmother. The neighbors spoke highly of her. The house was immaculate. She was moving into assisted living, and she left behind a life’s worth of built-ins, and a Steinway baby grand in what had been her formal dining room.

I turned that room into a music room. Hung two guitars on the wall, kept the piano. On the night of the housewarming party, we hired a singer to play it. My parents asked if we could turn the piano down. You can’t turn down a Steinway. That was a good night.

But her shelves were waiting in the other room. And I’d just cleared enough space to finally see them.

The picture frames I’d found in all those boxes — I filled them. They’re sitting there now, waiting to be hung. I’ll get to them. Everything in this room is either already in its place or on its way there. That’s how the room works. That’s how I work.

I have north of 300 books. Many I’ve read once. Many I’ve never read. Two small cabinets hold my childhood books — the ones that survived every move, every clearing, every version of my life that came before this one. Bedtime stories. Picture books with cracked spines. The ones my parents read to me and the ones I eventually read by myself with a flashlight when I was supposed to be asleep.

They’ve been in storage for years. Closed behind cabinet doors. Out of sight in the way that things go out of sight when you don’t have a place for them yet.

They have a place now.

On the shelf, in protective sleeves, is every Emmitt Smith card I’ve ever kept. Not a display — a record. The physical evidence of a collecting instinct that started in the early nineties with a rookie card and never fully stopped. If you’ve read All In, you know what those cards mean. If you haven’t — that’s where to start.

Next to them: photographs. Memorabilia. The specific objects that mean something to a specific person and nothing at all to anyone else. That’s the point. This room was never designed for anyone but me.

On one side, tucked against the wall: a green felt mat, my loupe, my strap tools, and a bourbon glass positioned at the corner of the frame. This is where I open watches. Where I hold something engineered to survive six thousand meters of pressure and try to understand what that means at sea level, on a quiet evening, with nowhere to be.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about this room.

I didn’t build it. I uncovered it.

Everything in it was already mine — the books, the cards, the tools, the records, the chair that needed a new home. They were just scattered across forty-something years of a life that hadn’t yet found the right place to put them all in the same room at the same time.

I moved some boxes to open some doors. And on the other side of the clearing, all of it was waiting.

The room didn’t start anything. The Emmitt Smith card was 1993. The books in those childhood cabinets go back further than I can clearly remember. The construction career that taught me what craft actually costs — twenty-four years of that.

It all started long before this room existed.

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

Bezels & Bourbon has always been about putting the reader in a chair. Not describing the chair from across the room — actually putting them in it. Giving them the light from that window, the weight of the glass, the specific moment a record side ends and the room goes quiet and you don’t get up to flip it right away because the silence earned its place too.

I built this room so I’d have a place to write from.

Then I realized I’d built it so you’d have a place to sit.

The needle is already down. Pull up a chair.

-Jaime

It started with an Emmitt Smith rookie card.

I was a kid in the early nineties, pocket money burning through my jeans, and the moment that card was in my hands I needed to know everything—print runs, condition grading, which sets were worth chasing, which dealers could be trusted. I pored through every Beckett price guide I could get my hands on, dog-earing pages, cross-referencing values, learning to read the market the way other kids read box scores. Within months I had binders, a mental index of the hobby that my friends found baffling and I found completely natural. I was not collecting football cards. I was building a system around football cards. The distinction, I would eventually understand, mattered.

Thirty-some years later, I own a watch collection tracked across a detailed spreadsheet, organized by complication and tier, with an acquisition roadmap that extends to 2053. My bourbon shelf has its own document. My records live on Discogs and in supplementary notes. My books have a Goodreads profile and, yes, additional context that most people would consider unnecessary. Cigars have recently entered the picture. Knives and EDC are never entirely dormant. I have been through phases of deep engagement with sport cards, gaming and tech, audio gear, cycling, fitness equipment, clothing and an ever-expanding shoe and boot collection. Each time, without exception, the pattern has been the same: find the interest, go all the way in, build the system, accumulate the knowledge. The objects have changed—a two-dollar card became a three-thousand-dollar watch, a pack of cards became a two-hundred-dollar bottle of bourbon—but the disposition driving the pursuit has not changed at all.

I used to wonder, occasionally, whether this was a character flaw. It is not. It is a methodology. And I have come to believe it produces something that more casual engagement simply cannot: genuine depth, and the particular satisfaction that comes only from knowing a subject on its own terms.

The Pattern Reveals Itself

When you have lived the same pattern enough times, you start to recognize it early. There is an initial encounter with something—a card, a piece of gear, an album, a watch in a shop window—that produces a specific quality of attention. Not just interest. Something closer to recognition. The mind leans in and does not lean back out.

What follows is research. Always research. Forums, books, communities of people who have been at it longer. The vocabulary of the domain—because every serious pursuit has one—gets absorbed quickly, because the vocabulary is the map of what matters. In cycling, you learn the difference between a training build and a race build, what a particular groupset signals about a bike’s intended use, why frame material is a more complex question than it first appears. In audio, you learn about impedance matching, the audible differences between cartridge types, why the pressing matters as much as the recording. In knives and EDC, you develop opinions about steel composition and heat treatment that would have seemed absurd to you six months earlier.

None of this knowledge is wasted, even when the phase passes. And some phases do pass—the cycling gear has been through several iterations, the gym equipment has had its quiet periods, the shoe and boot collection expanded and contracted over the years before settling into something more considered. But the knowledge compounds across domains in ways that are difficult to predict and consistently rewarding. Understanding why quality construction matters in a boot turns out to be excellent preparation for understanding why it matters in a watch. Learning to evaluate a record pressing teaches you something about evaluating any object where provenance and condition affect the experience of ownership.

The cycle itself has a reliable shape. It begins with a casual entry—something inexpensive that satisfies the initial burn of curiosity without overcommitting. From there, each piece or component gets evaluated and, where it falls short, upgraded. Systematically, deliberately, one informed step at a time, until either the collection reaches a natural end state or the intensity of interest cools. And when it cools, it rarely disappears entirely. It waits. Months later, sometimes years later, something reignites it—a conversation, an object encountered by chance, a gap in the collection that suddenly becomes impossible to ignore—and the whole machinery starts again, but now with the accumulated knowledge of the previous run behind it. Each cycle leaves the collection and the collector better than it found them.

The Case for Going Deep

There is a common argument for breadth—try many things, stay light, keep options open. It has merit. But it produces a particular kind of collector and a particular kind of experience: wide, entertaining, and ultimately shallow. The person who has dabbled in watches knows some brand names and a few reference numbers. The person who has spent years moving deliberately through tiers, reading the history, wearing the pieces, understanding the movement architecture, knows something categorically different. They have developed taste, and taste—real taste, earned rather than borrowed—changes the experience of ownership entirely.

This is the wisdom in going deep: the object and the knowledge of the object become inseparable. A bourbon is not just a bourbon when you understand its mash bill, its distillery’s history, where it sits in the continuum of what that producer has made. A record is not just an album when you know the pressing, the engineers involved, why this particular version sounds different from the reissue. The depth of knowledge does not complicate the enjoyment. It amplifies it.

There is also a practical argument. Depth protects you from the market. The collector who has done the work is not easily oversold. They know what something is actually worth, what alternatives exist at the same price point, where the genuine value lies versus where it is manufactured by hype. In watches, in bourbon, in records, in sport cards—every category has its mythology and its noise. Knowledge is the filter.

Why Incrementalism Is the Only Way In

Depth cannot be purchased in a single transaction. This is the part that resists the shortcut. You can buy an expensive watch without understanding watchmaking. You can buy a celebrated bourbon without having developed a palate. You can acquire a first pressing without knowing why it matters. The object arrives, but the knowledge does not come with it, and without the knowledge, you are holding something whose value you cannot fully access.

Incrementalism solves this. Moving through a domain in deliberate steps—spending real time at each level before ascending to the next—builds the knowledge alongside the collection. The entry-level piece teaches you what to look for in the mid-tier piece. The mid-tier piece gives you the context to evaluate the serious piece. By the time you are making a significant acquisition, you are not guessing. You have a considered position, earned through attention and patience.

My watch roadmap runs to 2053 not because I am a patient man by nature—I am not, particularly—but because I understand that the pieces at the end of that timeline will mean more when I reach them having done the work. The grail watch in a collection built from the ground up is a different object than the same watch purchased cold. The journey is not incidental to the destination. It is the reason the destination matters.

From Two Dollars to Two Thousand: The Evolution of Stakes

One thing changes as the methodology matures: the caliber of what it targets. The two-dollar football card was the right entry point for a kid with pocket money and an forming sensibility. It was not a compromise—it was the appropriate first step. But the knowledge that accumulates over years of serious collecting has a natural consequence: it raises the bar. Once you understand what genuine quality looks like, what separates a well-made object from a merely adequate one, it becomes increasingly difficult to settle for the adequate. The stakes evolve because the eye evolves.

The watches on my roadmap are not expensive because expense is the point. They are expensive because, at a certain level of craft, expense becomes the honest reflection of what went into the object—the movement finishing, the case work, the decades of horological tradition behind a caliber. The bottles on my bourbon shelf that carry real price tags carry them because the liquid inside is the product of time, grain, and genuine distilling knowledge that cannot be faked or rushed. The methodology gravitates toward quality not as status but as substance.

Alongside the evolution in stakes has come an increasingly specific set of preferences: a pull toward objects with genuine history behind them, toward things made by hand rather than at scale, toward editions that exist in limited numbers for considered reasons rather than manufactured scarcity. A limited production watch from an independent maker carries a different kind of meaning than a mass-market piece at the same price. A small-batch bourbon from a distillery with a real story behind it sits differently on the shelf than an allocated release chased purely for resale value. The provenance is not incidental. It is part of what is being collected.

Last December, I placed an order for my first pair of Beckett Simonon shoes—a wholecut in Italian leather, made to order, the kind of thing that requires patience before it even ships. They have not arrived yet. But the research that preceded that order was anything but casual. Before I even settled on a maker, I found myself deep in the long-running debate that serious shoe collectors know well: Goodyear welt versus Blake stitch. On the surface, it is a question of construction—how the upper, insole, and outsole are joined together. In practice, it determines everything from repairability and longevity to how the shoe feels underfoot as it breaks in, how water-resistant it is, how it will age over decades of wear. A Goodyear welted shoe can be resoled repeatedly and will last a lifetime with proper care. A Blake stitched shoe is more flexible from the first wear, slimmer in profile, with a different aesthetic logic entirely. These are not trivial distinctions. They are the difference between buying a shoe and understanding what a shoe can be. By the time I had made my decision, I had not just chosen a pair of shoes. I had developed a working knowledge of craft footwear construction that will inform every shoe purchase I make from here on. That is the methodology at work. And yes, they will be well worth the wait.

Where the Methodology Lives Now

The current expression of this pattern runs across several domains simultaneously, which is either impressive or alarming depending on your disposition. Watches, bourbon, records, and books carry the most weight right now—each tracked, each researched, each building toward something more considered than where it started. Cigars have recently joined the rotation, already with a 33-litre humidity-controlled cabinet fitted with Spanish cedar drawers and a digital hygrometer, because of course they have. The knife collection, never entirely at rest, is stirring again. The shoe and boot collection continues to grow with the same deliberate attention applied everywhere else.

The watch collection has its taxonomy and its roadmap. The bourbon shelf has its spreadsheet and its reading list of distillery histories. The records live on Discogs, where the platform’s insistence on specific pressings and matrix details enforces exactly the kind of precision this methodology demands. The books have Goodreads and supplementary notes on editions, context, and how each title connects to others in the library.

These are not separate hobbies running in parallel. They are simultaneous expressions of a single habit of mind—the same one that produced the binders of football cards in the nineties, the meticulous gear lists in other phases, the obsessive research that preceded every significant acquisition in between. The hobby changes. The methodology does not.

What a Lifetime of This Actually Produces

After three decades of this pattern across a dozen domains, what accumulates is not primarily a collection of objects. It is a cultivated sensibility—a finely developed ability to recognize quality, understand context, and engage with the things you love on their own terms. The objects are evidence of the sensibility. The spreadsheets are the working notes. The sensibility itself is the thing of value.

That sensibility transfers. Someone who has gone deep in one domain and developed genuine taste there carries something applicable everywhere: the habit of asking what makes something good rather than merely desirable, the patience to find out, the discipline to let the answer guide the decision. It is a way of paying attention, and it improves with practice.

There is also, I will admit, a quieter reward. The person who has done the work—who has read the history, worn the pieces, tasted the range, listened to the pressings—enjoys their collection differently. Not with the anxiety of the speculator or the restlessness of the dilettante, but with the settled pleasure of someone who knows exactly what they have and why they have it. That quality of enjoyment does not come from spending more. It comes from knowing more. And knowing more is always, in every domain, a matter of time and attention.

The Only Advice Worth Giving

If there is a practical takeaway in any of this, it is not a system to copy or a spreadsheet template to download. It is simpler and harder than that: when something earns your genuine interest, take it seriously. Do the reading. Build the vocabulary. Move through it deliberately rather than rushing to the destination. The depth you develop will outlast any individual acquisition, and it will make every acquisition more meaningful.

Right now, there is a glass of something considered on the desk beside me, a turntable working through an album I have been anticipating for weeks, a book open to a page I have been meaning to reach, and a watch on my wrist chosen with more confidence than I could have managed ten years ago. The roadmap runs to 2053. It started with a football card in the nineties.

None of it arrived at once. All of it was worth the wait.

— Jaime

The Allure of the “Fun Micro”

There is a specific joy in wearing a watch that doesn’t demand the “red carpet” treatment of a Daytona or the historical weight of a Submariner. In my collection, I categorize these as my “Fun Micros”—watches that prioritize character, storytelling, and a certain “get-up-and-go” energy. These are the daily wears. The watches that can take a beating and I won’t lose sleep over it.

Enter the Stewart Dawson Voyager (Ref. 1919.A.SS) in Military Green.

To be perfectly candid, this was my first watch from the Watch Gang Platinum Tier subscription.

Design & Dial

Stewart Dawson excels at blending British heritage with Italian flair, and the Voyager is the poster child for that marriage. The 1919 series draws inspiration from early 20th-century trench watches, but the “Military Green” dial brings it firmly into the modern day.

• The Color: It’s a deep, mossy olive that shifts depending on the light. The matte finish absorbs the glare of sunlight, making those bold, luminescent Arabic numerals pop.

• The Case: It feels substantial without being bulky—a necessary balance when you’re transitioning from a morning lifting session to a casual afternoon meeting. Its currently the heaviest watch I own coming in at 290.6 grams

Why It Works

It’s a “tool watch” in spirit, but it’s handsome enough to wear to a weekend brunch. It doesn’t try too hard, which is exactly why it has earned its spot alongside my more “serious” pieces. At a $239 price point, it’s a reminder that horological soul isn’t always tied to a five-figure MSRP. Direct this watch is listed at $650.00

Specifications

Case
Material: Stainless steel 316L
Diameter: 41 mm
Thickness: 14.6 mm
Lug to lug: 50 mm

Movement
Automatic Japanese movement: Miyota 8215
Hours, minutes and central seconds, with date at 3 o’clock
Power reserve: 42 hours

Dial & Hands
Dial colour: Military Green
Indexes: Applied with Super-LumiNova
Glass: Sapphire crystal with multi-layer anti-reflective and anti-fingerprint coatings
Water resistance: 10 bar / 100 meters

The Verdict

The Voyager is a conversation starter. It’s for the days when you want something unique on the wrist that can handle a bit of sweat and adventure. It’s rugged, it’s green, and it’s a vital part of my “Fun Micro” rotation.

It’s the same principle that draws me to certain watches and certain bourbons. Not as obsessions in themselves, but as quiet metaphors for how I approach life. A watch that dares to be bold—larger case, intricate dial, complications that reward study—mirrors the idea that time isn’t just marked; it’s honored with depth and character. The best ones carry handmade touches: hand-engraved details, guilloché patterns finished by artisans, or even dials woven from reclaimed charred oak barrel wood, blending the patience of aging spirit with the precision of steel. They sit heavy on the wrist, a reminder that anything worth strapping on deserves to declare presence responsibly, without apology.

Bourbon works the same way in my mind. It starts simple—grains, water, fire—then surrenders to years in charred oak, emerging layered: vanilla giving way to caramel, oak, spice, a slow-building finish. I don’t rush it. I explore, nose, sip thoughtfully. It’s responsible indulgence at its finest—charismatic in the sharing, never loud or wasteful. Pouring two glasses on a quiet night, handing one over and watching her take that first appreciative sip, adds a warmth that deepens everything. Her presence doesn’t compete; it completes the moment, turning reflection into something shared and fuller.

That same principle extends to how I dress. Maximalism here means investing in the handmade: suits where every element is deliberate. Full canvassing that molds to your frame over time, lapels hand-padded for natural roll, buttonholes stitched one by one, pick stitching along the edges that whispers quiet luxury rather than shouts it. When the tailor nails it, the suit becomes an extension of character—sharp, enduring, confident. Walking into an evening with her hand lightly on my arm, the fit impeccable and the details subtle, it feels right. Not flashy, just present. Her grace beside me elevates it all—steady, effortless, making the layers feel harmonious and alive.

These aren’t separate compartments—watches, bourbon, tailoring. They’re expressions of the same thread: committing fully to what matters, building richness with responsibility, carrying it with charisma. And having a good woman by my side weaves through every part—her quiet smile in shared moments, her hand on my arm as we move through a room, her presence turning good into something deeper, more memorable. It’s not about adding noise; it’s about amplifying what’s already there.

In the end, this is how I try to live: dive in completely when it counts, honor the craft behind it, and cherish the company that makes the whole picture richer. Anything worth doing deserves that level of attention—done right, done fully, done with heart.

Here’s to evenings like this—thoughtful, layered, and shared well.

Cheers,
-Jaime