Hooray for watches! (And also for clocks and steam engines.)

Real machines give me true joy; there is nothing else in the world that can hold my interest for days on end. I can walk the length of San Francisco, oblivious to everything, save the picture in my mind's eye of a perfect double three-legged gravity escapement. I see the parts and pieces that I plan to build, swining back and forth... My plan is to get at least a crude version up and running in my apartment, with winding accomplished by the motion of my front door. My only fear is that the ticking might keep me up at night. My marine chronometer from russia had noise issues and so it's been several years since I've wound it.

My fascination with machines is like Cesar's fascination with laser dots. Cesar is Kevin's cat, and a red dot zipping across the floor is far more attractive to him than any mouse. I wonder if he knows it's just a game. I wonder if he accepts the absurdity but chooses to partake nonetheless. Or perhaps he really thinks that a very fast red bug is always just beyond his reach, vanishing when he pounces on it and reappearing on the ceiling. His nemisis. He probably stays awake at night plotting strategy, thinking of better ways to hunt.