Fiction & Essays from Vaulted Watch
ESSAY
The SBGA283 is not a watch for the man who has conquered his past. Such men exist mainly in autobiographies written by liars. It is a watch for someone who has made peace with the evidence: the mistakes that cannot be revised, the ambitions that belonged to someone else and the earlier selves who did the best they could with limited information.
Read the essayESSAY
Grand Seiko just confirmed it's retiring the entire current Evolution 9 Hi-Beat "Birch" lineup this October, same movement, new bracelet and clasp, and a roughly 23% price jump at the register. That kind of running change usually tells you something about where the outgoing watches are headed on the secondary market. I break down the math in this week's issue.Also inside: • Seiko Group's stock is up 392% over the trailing twelve months on real revenue growth, not hype • Why Grand Seiko, King Seiko, and Credor are still almost invisible at the major Swiss auction houses, even in a record year for watch auctions overall • Naoya Hida's first chronograph, and a Kurono Tokyo piece that's already flipping near double retail.
ESSAY
Two heavy brancards run the length of the watch. They could have been smooth, but they aren't. Somebody carved them into a repeating pattern of ridges and cuts. The silver catches light on the high spots and goes dark in the grooves. Fifty years of oxidation and wear have made the effect stronger than it started.
ESSAY
The outer scorecard is what everyone else thinks of your choices. The inner scorecard is whether you can live with them yourself. I ignored mine for a very long time.
FICTION
You have to understand what this flyer was promising me. It was promising the barbershop of yesteryear — not Kepler’s, which was the barbershop of actual yesteryear and smelled like Barbicide and Ronnie’s boat dreams — but the idea of yesteryear. The one from the ads. Leather and wood and a man calling you “sir” while another man racked the balls. I was a salon convert, sure, but somewhere in me lived a guy who wanted a hot towel and a beer and SportsCenter, and that guy had been reading this flyer for a month.
ESSAY
The Holy Trinity is Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin, and you're meant to recite it the way you recite a creed — three names, no substitutions, no questions. So I'll ask one. What is Audemars Piguet doing in there?
ESSAY
But here is what I actually want to tell you, and it has less to do with escapements than with time itself, the thing all of this is supposed to be about.
ESSAY
Louann was the only girl in a house full of brothers — wiry, grizzled men who looked like they’d been cut out of a cigarette ad. My great uncle Bud had the Marlboro Man’s mustache and his weathered skin, and any one of those men would just as soon whip your ass as pat you on the back. She came up in that house and came out of it tough as nails.
FICTION
Naomi Uemura’s body was never recovered. He radioed down from the Denali summit on February 13, 1984, and then the mountain kept him. What follows is one of the days that might have been.
ESSAY
Nobody climbed Everest with one. Nobody conquered space wearing one. It belongs to the vast anonymous middle of civilization—the people who actually keep the lights on.
FICTION
A few weeks after he was fired, a package arrived in the mail. It was his one-year anniversary gift. The card inside thanked him for his "Dedicated Service." It was signed by the head of HR. She had been dead for three months. Dedicated Service is a short story about layoffs, marriage, a traveling salesman, a Cartier Pasha, and the strange comfort we sometimes find in unexpected places. 7-minute read.
FICTION
Harold Isaacs was the lone survivor of a small plane crash in the lowland jungle southeast of Cusco, Peru when he was just a boy of thirteen. The two other passengers were his uncle Jack, who died on impact, and the pilot, who lived two more days pinned in the twisted metal of the cockpit.
New watches. Original essays and fiction. One thoughtful email at a time.
