Highway Hedonism for the Way Down

Aaron Brogan is the author of Let the Big Dog Eat, published by Simon & Schuster and available wherever silly books are sold.

Pattie Boyd & Eric Clapton

Holding it in my hands I knew I was in trouble. A perfect little steel object. Something beautiful.

As a younger man, I was unaware of the risks that stuff posed. I felt the siren call of consumerism, but I didn’t recognize it for what it was. But by the time I held this watch, I knew what was happening. For all the good it did me.

The first time always stays with you—and for me, it was guitars. I’ll say I came to it honestly. Twelve years old laying in a bunk in Casco, Maine listening to Slash play Civil War. I knew what I was going to do with my life. 

So I went to the pawn shop with my mom and we sold my trumpet to buy a slick blue Ibanez IJRX20-BL. Not a fancy guitar, mind you—close to the cheapest you could buy at the time— but I loved it and it was mine. I played it till my fingers bled. 

In those early days of YouTube, I would watch grainy clips of Clapton playing Steppin’ Out and repeat it back as well as I could. And after a while this miraculously started to work. I was good, man. I couldn’t play Neon but, hell, I knew the intro to Heartbreaker and I could get it right most of the time. 

YouTube: Cream - Eric Clapton/Steppin' Out (Farewell Concert - Extended Edition)

I fantasized about myself on stage, alone in the spotlight like Hendrix— but that wasn’t meant to be. See when you get better at something, you pick the low hanging fruit first. Pentatonic scales—noodling as they call it—that stuffs easy, but then you get that down and now you have to focus and think to keep getting better. As I’m sure you know, thinking is hard. 

So, subtly, without me noticing, the object of my desire changed. These guitar gods I idolized weren’t playing Ibanez IJRX20-BL! They were playing 1959 Gibson Les Pauls and 1956 Black Fender Stratocasters. I wanted these guitars. And some icy night in Maine my focus flipped. At fifteen I went to bed thinking about playing guitar. At sixteen I dreamed of owning them. 

It was a breathless obsession. Every day I would go to musiciansfriend.com to lust for the artifacts. Custom Shop limited edition fat ‘50s Stratocaster relic. Stevie Ray Vaughan artist series Stratocaster. Les Paul standard 60s — bourbon burst. 

I cut grass on the weekends and saved the twenties I got back in a cigar box—waiting for the day I could finally blow them at the Guitar Center. And when I could, man, I was a pig in shit—I bought guitars, amps, and pedals. More than I could ever use. More than anyone could need. Each a beautiful totem to a lifestyle far beyond my reach. In the end, even the act of coveting could get me a little high and, after a while, that was enough for me.

Parasitism is a relationship between two things where one grows at the expense of the other. I know now that that’s what happened back then. As I bought more and more, poured more effort into acquisition, it came at the expense of hard work, growth. Where I had been ahead of the curve at fifteen other, less compulsive, peers soon surpassed me. By the time I went to college at eighteen, I was finished. Haven’t seriously played since. It’s easy to buy things. Hard to do ‘em. 

So after that I learned to recognize the signs. Do you find yourself YouTube scrolling videos of some highly finished hardware? Cars, cameras, even graduate schools can fit this bill. Anything that might prick a certain region of the brain associated with desire. 

In retrospect I find it all a little embarrassing. I got so into this thing, just to end up being a buyer and not a doer. I let it get the better of me. So for years after I fought against the impulse to obsess, classify, rank, purchase. It seemed to me like an exploitable loophole of the psyche, and one I wanted closed. 

And that was still my mindset when I was introduced to this new mechanical fetish by a loved one this year. I felt a little queasy. I knew what was happening here. When the watch touched my hand I felt the twinge. I had a vision of myself in some dusty shop, discussing the difference between ETA and in-house movements, characterizing materials and complications across a range of increasingly infinitesimal criteria. If I held this thing any longer, I would fall prey again to what Freud called the narcissism of small differences — where the functional indistinguishability of two things leads to obsessive focus on distinctions that would seem trivial to any sane outsider. 

But here’s the thing. I still have the guitar I bought when I was sixteen. And object of shame as it is, it still shines just like it did back then. It turns out beautiful things have value independent of function. And this, to me, is the redemption of watches. They don’t expect you to do anything.

Unlike a guitar or camera, which imposes a reciprocal burden on the purchaser to be a musician or photographer, the watch buyer is only called to jauntily glance at their wrist from time to time. I can certainly do that. 

So sure, it's just a thrill—but it's a good one. Who wouldn’t savor a romp on the low road here and there? Who would be sane when they could instead, for a moment, be saved from this mortal coil?

If I let go of the distaste for my past failures, I can recognize the illicit joy of buying something just to admire its craft. Releasing frugality to feel the cool hand of dopamine across my brow. There is much suffering in this world, but not in that room, sir. Many people told me that it was better to buy experiences than things, but you can’t wear a memory. 

So if they ask over my grave why I’m buried with a watch on, tell them I let it in. 

Aaron Brogan is the author of Let the Big Dog Eat, published by Simon & Schuster and available wherever silly books are sold.