The Benjamin Report

Knockoff Green Casio Watch

My recollection of my desperate search for a new, reliable but affordable digital watch and the madness that had come of it.

Forever ago, my dad gifted me a Timex analog watch. It was a neat little device that, along with the time of day, also showed the date. The trouble I had was adjusting all these features. There was only one dial that you’d rotate to set each of the settings. Pushing it in at different degrees allowed you to adjust the hours and minutes. That was it though, I could never figure out how to change the date. Frustrating as it was, getting by wasn’t so much trouble until daylight savings and eventually the dreaded leap day.

Unable to manage the device’s nifty but completely unnecessary features, I was thrown into a chaos that threatened my comfortable equilibrium. This simple design error had me in sympathies with the nutters and paranoiacs who touted the Y2K conspiracies back in the late 90’s. But whereas the latter was a global phenomenon pushed to extensive coverage by the mass media, the former was a personal drama revolving around a potential imbalance in my day-to-day outfits.

Fallible institutions, misinformation, mock terrorism, and covert paramilitary campaigns abound in my brain like a microcosm of the illicit fears of the late 90’s. That was it, an exact replica communicated through nerve impulses, a biological covenant developed over thousands of years of evolution.

Taken together, there was no such thing as a coincidence, this was a predetermination. Like the years of political errors that led to the coincidences of where the world was in 1999 and where it is today, my life, singular as it is, developed the same way but with an anxiety over a faulty watch. There is, however, a slight difference in the aftermaths of both events.

Y2K, from bird’s-eye view, became a blip, a pouting dot on a radar drifting across the display. My anxiety though was a wildfire no matter how you looked at it. A situation that presented no end nor easy solution.

The Timex watch I placed on my dresser and let my messy habits bury it away. Over time, the thing became part of the clutter of old receipts and misplaced coins. Though despite its new life as a fossil in the heap, its innate ticking polluted me entirely. That rap, with its perfect rhythm the envy of a metronome, hounded me like swarms of ants in colonizing force.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Its shadow in me coarsed my life away. Dust flights, insanity embellished by charm, and allured in my sleep by the moments between the sounds, half-seconds of silent bliss inevitably precluded by the torment of that quick colorless noise.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Fire. Fire. Fire.

Poison, calamitous and unfettered, facewise bone-breaking temporal disorder. Cowards in courtesy, prostripment in the license of paradisic living. An empire imploded, flames but churned beneath the foundation and carried to the heavens.

With my brains as soured as they were, solutions were randomized in a circuit treatment I couldn’t properly decode. The panicked spasms in my reaches allowed for only one possibility. A replacement was required.

My choice, based upon frugal allowance and availability, was a digital watch with an elastic band. Perhaps built of resin dyed in vibrant color with a cheap but durable display. Dear burnt out lord by my side, in exhaustion and grace we’ve finally made it back to the bedrock.

But. Tumble and crack. Another error has presented itself. This time, it’s the cyber economy purveying through Amazon.com. The online marketplace and vast reach of petty scoundrels.

There are nearly 2 million brands on Amazon selling over 600 million varied products. The majority of said brands are falsities. Chinese vendors, based in the Guangdong Province (mainly the city of Shenzhen, the financial epicenter of the country), traffic their cheap goods to America via Amazon’s website. As to remain onboard Amazon’s online marketplace, these vendors seek, obtain, and keep multiple registered trademarks under “names” comprised of random letter combinations (XubbluvnnE).

These brands are everywhere on Amazon’s platform, usually parroting similar products and offering the best deals. If you like scarves from BFONS, you might like the similar set from Yatemiole (both Chinese brands). And if you by chance need a splash guard for your kitchen sink, well you’re in luck because they sell that too!

But summer is coming up, perhaps the time for scarves has passed. I do need new shorts though, good thing the always reliable QPNGRP has got me covered. Their shorts are reliably comfortable and cheap enough that I feel no ounce of embarrassment when buying four pairs. And I don’t have to feel anxious about my large collection of shorts from companies like QPNGRP, COOFANDY, and the confidently luxurious JMIERR because according to their thousands of reviews many of their customers buy more and more and MORE!

We’re talking mass collections of pants, t-shirts, shorts, tank-tops, piercings, and nipple pasties. This information wasn’t garnered from Amazon though, it was taken from their approved trademark requests.

A lot of these brands don’t try that hard when it comes to their applications and company identities. They don’t have their own websites and in their trademark requests don’t even list a logo or really any identifying factors. Thankfully, JMIERR wasn’t like that.

JMIERR has their own website, and they even list all their products (although purchasing any of them requires Amazon as an intermediary sales platform). Apparently the name JMIERR was chosen not through randomized letter combo generation, but as an intended acronym. And if you need any more signals of authenticity, the website offers a short video cut together of different shots within a clothing manufacturing factory (although, there is no branding in the video).

To register a trademark in the United States though, you need an accompanying US based attorney. JMIERR, for example, is represented by a Cleveland lawyer specializing in Intellectual Property Law. QPNGRP has their guy in Illinois. And COOFANDY theirs in Glendale, California.

The rabbit holes only deepen from here. Navigating this swamp can prove to be a near endless pursuit in search of metaphors for lost sanities and institutionalized dotted lines. The point was lost when I found that the iconic and affordable CASIO watches of yesteryear entered the domain of recognized branding. Because of this, phony Chinese companies and their sham products look all the more alluring.

My ideal green casio watch is no longer a CASIO, but a knockoff branded as SKMEI but sold by GOSASA on the most popular market in the United States. I do not need a casio attached to my wrist, if it costs as much to manufacture as the GOSASA or RHONDRY version, all that I’m left with is their iconic name.

At some point, we’ll reach the breakage where the consumer would rather hold onto an extra dollar for a utility item rather than cough it up for its American equivalent. In that universe, future, or hidden parallel our American communities will melt like the glaciers. We are solid in our understanding of our makeup, but oblivious to the climate built by the maddening greed of human nature and over-consumption of its own doo-doo.

…all that I’m left with is their iconic name

In my attempt to curtail my anxiety, my own Y2K, I found the underground that soiled and reconstructed the foundation of cyberspace. A space of which that has and continues a mission of great replacement of the natural world. The prevailing fears of the late 90’s of crashing computers and broken government systems were supposedly subdued and relegated to simple quirks in history. We forget these things like we forget the moles on our bodies, those with their cloaked schemes of evolving cancers like covert operations and mass communication manipulation.

Bursting caustic, higher powers and torn ligaments, quiet destructions and larceny of faith. My head, it hurts. I wanted a green casio watch that cost hopefully no more than twenty dollars, but I don’t have the twenty-three and a half to afford it. I also don’t want my American dollars sent to the pseudo corporations dominating the cheaper market. Luckily though, the battery on the Timex has died.

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Thank you for reading, see you next week…