Sell All Your Watches So Cheap It Hurts
For six days and nights, Baines Beaton wore nothing but the all-black tactical Exit Watch on his wrist. Confidently wearing his Night Vision timepiece, he slept, showered, scrubbed pots and pans, changed smoke alarms, took his twin daughters to YogurtLand, killed house flies and mosquitos, grilled wild-caught sockeye salmon, and chased away a burly one-eyed raccoon eating a fennel shrub in his backyard.
At night, he noticed he was cognizant of wearing his Exit Watch in his dreams. In one dream he had a flashback to a summer day in 1978 when he was sixteen. His family and ten other families and friends had made their annual sojourn to Pt. Reyes Beach where they ate what seemed like bottomless truck beds of oysters. From noon to sunset, they ate an infinite amount of barbecued oysters served with garlic-lemon butter and Tabasco sauce, thousands of loaves of garlic bread, and colossal slices of moist chocolate cake. Ignoring warnings of nearby great white shark sightings, Baines and his bodybuilding friends would punctuate their feasting with forays into the waves before emerging from the ocean. Their muscular pecs shiny with rivulets of salt water, they returned to the picnic tables and gorged on barbecued oysters like savages. In that summer of 1978, Baines had opted to have his parents drive home without him. He got a ride home in the back of a truck with random people he had met that day. Full from a day of feasting and feeling like King Neptune, they stared into the stars with their glazed lizard eyes and entertained each other with crazy stories.
In the dream, everything was exactly as Baines had remembered with one big difference. As he observed himself emerging from the ocean waves with his friends, he was brandishing the all-black Exit Watch. It was as if the Exit Watch had instigated itself into his past and had become part of his mythical origin story. The Exit Watch had reshaped his memories so that now the watch was not something he had acquired as the result of his obsessive timepiece hobby, which he started in his early forties amid a mid-life crisis. Now the timepiece was something that he had desired all of his life and embodied the glory of his youth.
When he woke up, he was forlorn and depressed, realizing that the muscular teenage boy was now gone forever and replaced by an overweight bald man who spent too much time agonizing over his watch collection.
He looked across the bed and saw that his wife was gone.
His Exit Watch spoke to him. “Come on, Sour Pants, get out of bed. Your wife has already gone to work and your daughters have already left for your school. You slept in.”
Baines stared at his watch and said, “You were in my dream. I wore you on my wrist when I was sixteen at Pt. Reyes. You and I ate oysters together.”
“I didn’t eat any oysters, Fat Face. You did. Now get out of bed. We’ve got work to do.”
Baines walked to the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee, and walked to his office where his watch box sat next to his computer. Inside the box were six other watches, which he had not worn in over a week.
“It’s time to rip the Band-Aid off the wound, Fat Face. You know what you have to do.”
“I have to sell all of them, don’t I.”
“That is correct. And to make sure you get rid of them before you have any second thoughts, put them all on eBay for cheap.”
“How cheap?”
“So cheap it hurts. So cheap you keel over, clutch your stomach and fall into the fetal position. I want you to hurt so bad, Fat Face, you never forget this hurt. You know why? Because you will no longer be a Man of Rotation. You will be a One-Watch Man from here on out. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
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