Last night I was in a restaurant on Bondi Beach when an attractive full breasted blonde woman from a neighbouring table leaned across and asked if she could come and see my ‘stack’ . When she came across she asked me if it was real or fake, then moved to my wrist watch, a replica Rolex that belongs to my friend, he had asked me to change the rubber strap on it, laden with diamonds it was the kind of watch that belonged on wankers at the Met Gala, sponsored by watch companies that cling to celebrity these days like monkeys to a vine, swinging from one hot new actor to the next rising sports star and so on. I told her it was mostly fake, not entirely true, but she was not asking for the right reasons, and I have a girlfriend already.
It got me thinking about why I still do it. I do not need to stack my wrist, it was a cultural phenomenon I abhorred in the beginning, something I associated with people that didn’t work for anyone else, they inherited a family company or something similar. Sometimes it was the privilege of business owners who did not need to report to anyone or fit it. Whatever it’s cultural significance, it had become a bit of a parody in Australia, associated with recently single fathers trying to find themselves post a marriage breakdown, something that ended up being a Betooota Instagram post. Sadly, I fell into all categories.
However, I seem to be holding onto the stack despite my reasoning that it is time to let it go. I am now forty-six approaching forty-seven. I am not cool, my daughter reminds me of that every time we walk the streets and she asks me to use ‘inside voice’. I am so far removed from popular culture that I stare with my fuzzy vision sans spectacles trying to ascertain just who the fuck are these people at the Met Gala. I wonder if Ana Wintour wakes up on the eve and says to herself ‘here we fucking go again’ desperately clinging to a need to stay culturally relevant in an all out assault to make herself memorable to more than the generation that she belonged to.
And it all comes about so quickly you know. One minute you are the whipper snapper desperate to prove yourself with your product and your writing, adapting from blogs to YouTube to Instagram, now Tik Tok; then, one day, as Pink Floyd once sang ‘ten years have got behind you, no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun’.
But then now that you are a relic, and I must admit I am being a little too self deprecative, but for a reason, but now that you are, you are left with a freedom that since you no longer have anyone to impress, you can simply choose what you like.
Which leads me back to my stack. I don’t wear necklaces, I find them uncomfortable, I turned my very last one into a snake chain bracelet which wraps double, I don’t like rings they annoy me and again, uncomfortable. But the wrist watch and the stack are playful additions that you can be chopped and changed to suit. They remain the only way I wish to wear any jewellery and for the time being, middle aged as I am, culturally less relevant, but now free to choose as would please me, the stack stays.