Watch This.

I haven't worn a watch since 2003. (And I sported one that summer only because I was traveling through various countries and didn't have access to a cell phone or computers but needed to be on time all the time.) This isn't because I tapped the secret lifeforce that flows through us all, or because I don't care about showing up on time. (I actually value being prompt, which makes my poor internal sense of time particularly ironic.) Its just that I don't need a watch to do it. I have three devices on my person right now that tell time. The title of this Slate article makes me think they have a little more insight but they pretty much just attribute the decline to prevalence of public displays and personal devices. Which is the educated guess I would have made too. They do have a bit of information on the downward slide of watches and the rise of wrist accessories.

"Newsweek Interactive advertising sales office revealed that fewer than half of these mostly young, urban, educated professionals were wearing watches. They don't need to. -- All of this is bad news for the watch industry—or at least for that sector of the watch industry that sells watches meant to be used to tell time, as opposed to watches that are meant to be worn as fashion accessories or as portable symbols of status and wealth."

• Slate: Why You Don't Need a Watch Anymore

I remember sitting in kindergarten while the teacher was showing the class how a clock worked. This was the first time I consciously decided not to learn something. I said to myself "I'm not paying attention to this." And I didn't. I don't know if I didn't think the content was important enough to warrant my attention, or if I had something better going on in the back of class, but as a result I didn't learn to tell time from an analog clock until the 10th grade. Well, let me revise that. I knew how to tell time, it just took me longer than it should have. Kinda like the difference between knowing how to multiply and memorizing your times tables.

So I had digital watches from around 6th grade till 10th, when I bought a watch off a kid named Marco in environmental science class for ten bucks. He had a binder full of watches. I paid with a check. It was pretty sweet with an analog display and a clear reverse panel so you could see the mechanism that automatically wound from natural wrist movements. So I forced myself into using that kind of display until the watch broke about 8 months later. I feel fine about it and hold no ill will to Marco or whatever source Marco had for these timepieces. I figure that investment surpassed my expectations at about week 3.

So I've never really worn a watch as a decoration. But maybe I should start, you know as a "portable status of wealth." And I know just the place, Bellum Watches. They scour every source they can think of to get classic old watches, refurbish and embellish them with hand engravings or whatever and sell them for god knows how much. Seriously, each one is a commissioned work, so there's no prices on the site. If a skull on the back of a Rolex doesn't say I've got cash, I don't know what will.

• Thrillist: Bellum Classic Watches