The Hodinkee John Mayer G-Shock

Hodinkee, the nearest thing I've found to a horological periodical I can take seriously, narrowly beating out Time + Tide, put a post on Facebook with a huge headline about an upcoming release of a collaboration between John Mayer, G-Shock and Hodinkee. It's not even a link to a story about the new John Mayer G-Shock. Just a huge banner headline saying that it's coming soon.

My G-Shock cost under $50 on Amazon back in May. I'm pleased with it, although most days I wear a mechanical, or 2 mechanicals, one on each wrist. An expensive G-Shock (by which I mean, priced between $200 and many thousands) seems to me to be a contradiction of what a G-Shock is: superior basic function and no frills. It seems silly, like a solid gold Seiko 5 or a $200,000 deluxe Volkswagen Bug. 

John Mayer? A disappointment to me, but it's not his fault that such big expectations were set upon him. A disappointment MUSICALLY. As any kind of horological expert, he's not a disappointment, he's a joke. Or maybe not even a joke, but just a punchline. 

Hodinkee? Easier for me to take seriously when they're not involved in this sort of thing. 

But I have to remember that it's a mistake to take anything to do with watches too seriously. For about 40 years, quartz watches -- such as the G-Shock -- have been more accurate than mechanical watches. But we watch fanciers fancy mechanical watches almost all of the time. The biggest exception being the G-Shock, a very popular option among military special forces. 

 

But most of us who buy G-Shocks are just pretending to be commandos. (Do even commandos still actually need any sort of watches, or is that need now covered by phones and other computers, as it is with the rest of us? I have no idea.) The way that most people who buy diver's watches, which are mostly mechanical and can be extremely expensive, never go diving, and the way that most people who wear pilot's watches are not pilots -- and so forth. It's a big game which is all in our heads, the same way that most people who own Porsches which can go 200mph never drive them as fast as 100mph. The same way that very, very many things are just games in our heads.

It's all very, very silly, this business with watches. Whenever I forget that, I become even sillier.