Listen, young man; I want to tell you a story. When I was your age—a free and single man, roaming the world, responsible for myself and answerable to no one—I was happy. Then, one afternoon in Milwaukee, I met a woman who changed all that. I got a bad feeling off of her right from the get-go. She was rude, loud, mean, and she smelled overpoweringly bad. Plus, at the time of that first meeting, she was being arrested by four cops—one of whom she’d punched out cold—for serial acts of animal cruelty.

Still, there was something about her that intrigued me. I’ll tell you what it was: Her watch. It was this really sharp-lookin’ Seiko Rivoli with a gray leather band. Really sharp. I thought to myself: Shoot, anybody with a timepiece that handsome has got to be in possession of unseen reserves of taste, style and good judgment. So I bailed her out and we began a romance.

Well, actually, romance is the wrong word. What’s a word for something generally shaped like a romance, but where the object is for one party to grind the other into a jelly of blood, bone fragments and submission? Anyway, she gambled my salary away, she was prone to unpredictable mood swings, she hated my family—actually urinated in my father’s Cream-of-Wheat once, that was a story right there—and ran a Saturday-night toad-fighting league in our garage for years.

After she finally died (in an unimaginably violent toad-gladiator rebellion), I found out the only reason she had that watch was that she found a super-good deal on it at some deal-a-day website. ‘Tweren’t a question of her taste or elegance or refinement or anything. That watch just happened to have been a good deal, was all.

What I’m saying is: A wristwatch doesn’t tell you anything about a person. Not even that she has wrists, necessarily. I lost many happy years at the expense of that lesson.

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