This is a Bitchin' Watch

Nothing can distract you from your miserable, carless existence better than a new watch. Especially a really bitchin' new watch that does shit.

Most people are happy to settle for watches that don't do a goddamned thing other than tell the time and look swanky on their wrists, but not Omar Bricks. I've always demanded more from a wristwatch. Over the years I've had watches that said the time out loud (to save my valuable looking time), watches that told the temperature, the direction, the altitude, my heart rate, and watches that recorded me saying some spooky ventriloquist shit that I could play back during meetings when my mouth obviously wasn't moving.

I had one watch that worked as a remote-control for the TV. This was pretty sweet, but what I really wanted on that worked as a remote-control for a remote-controlled dune buggy. That would have been the cat's ass. But I guess I was a little ahead of my time in that desire because they never made one.

As a kid, I'd generally been satisfied with lame-assed time-telling watches, until the third grade when I collected enough box tops and sent away for a watch that played the video game Frogger. Holy shit, I thought at the time, now there's a watch. My current green plastic watch was clearly in need of replacement, as the picture of Fozzie was badly flaking off. Most kids were going the Swatch route, since those things came with some gay-assed band of plastic that kept the front from getting all scratched and kept you from having to figure out that arcane hand-based system of time telling, since the protective band blocked your view of the rest of the watch anyway. A few others had thrown their lot in with the Mickey Mouse watch, but I knew that was verging into ass-beating territory in the higher grades so I steered clear of any of that happy bullshit.

Nope, the Frogger watch was the one for me. As the six to eight weeks of estimated shipping time dragged by, I daydreamed about school days spent Froggering away in the back of the class while the rest of those dopes learned fractions. And they'd never be the wiser, since it's not like I was dragging a full-sized arcade version of the game into the classroom with a coat thrown over it or anything. No way man, I was on the low-down, for all they would know I was back there trying to adjust for daylight savings time or jerking off or whatever. It was the perfect plan.

After seemingly forever, the watch finally in the mail, in a bubble-wrap envelope no less. Talk about Christmas coming twice in one day, the long-awaited watch and bubble wrap. Shit. I busted the watch out, laughed at the Taiwanese instructions, and within minutes I was in Frogger heaven. Or something. In actuality, playing the watch wasn't anything like playing Frogger, but it had some stickers of the frog from the game on it, and that was pretty cool. And if you had an active imagination, you could imagine that one of those black dots that was blinking on and off was the frog from the picture, sort of, and it was kind of like what playing the game would be like if you had severe brain damage.

And hey, it was on a watch, and pretending it was Frogger was a whole hell of a lot better than studying the Spanish Civil War. So I was on sunshine street for about three days, until one day the watch took a hit during a tetherball grudge match and that piece of shit fell apart. Then, to make matters worse, that little asshole Toby Sklar got a PacMan watch out of a box of Kix as if on cue and everybody was lining up to kiss his ass after that. Everyone could see that the actual game looked exactly like the Frogger watch game, just a bunch of black dots blinking on and off, but there was a Pac-Man sticker on the wristband and Pac-Man had always been more popular than Frogger. And it wasn't broken, he definitely had me there.

So I did the only thing a third-grader can do in that situation, I hit Toby in the head with an apple, and when he fell down he landed on his arm and the watch broke.

And that's the problem with watches that do cool shit, those fuckers break like Korean cars. Not long after you figure out how to use all the cool features, you get shut in an elevator door or you get in a construction site fight and there goes the damn watch. You can play hockey with watches that don't do anything, they always last forever even when you don't want them to.

This is a trend that's about to come to an end, however, because I just got the bitchinest watch there is. This thing tells the time, temperature, altitude, barometric pressure, cardinal direction, GPS coordinates, how far away you are from bacon, Sig-Alert status… Hell, for all I know this thing could free South Africa. Plus it's got a nightlight that would blind Stevie Wonder, I don't even think it's night any more when I turn that thing on.

Rest assured that this is now Omar Bricks' Watch For Life, nothing's happening to this bad boy. Plus, the thing's the size of a soup can so there's no way it's going to get all banged up from being worn on my wrist like a common timepiece. I'm thinking of keeping it in the box, that thing seems pretty well padded.

Now I just need find somebody who knows what time it is. Bricks out.

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