Watching For Good Times

by Siegfried Haug

Many people have asked me how I came to invent the now omni-present Good-Times-Watch. Truth be told, it was a fluke.

As I look back I can see a confluence of circumstantial happenstances – a veritable conspiracy of trivia – affording me that breakthrough in mind-technology: the harnessing of good-time-power. So, in all fairness The Watch was not an invention proper, it was more in the nature of a fortuitous find.

At the time, I was on my way to The Corner Restaurant on Route 9 for an early Saturday breakfast. My windshield still frosted, and the wheel so cold, I steered with my fingertips.

Fall had finally evacuated the hills before the advances of yet another winter.

A pale full morning-moon hung over the Berkshire hills, quite faint, but clearly watching us. Squinting at the road through my windshield’s thawing left hand corner, crouched like a hunchback supplicant, cold fingers poised on wheel piano-virtuoso-style, I beheld the Judds’ red barn.

Their brown mare breathing clouds of steam, framed, in the half-door of her shed. Low sailing remnants of this night’s fog slinking away… Limp strips, raggedly torn from an old sheet. So nonchalantly did they expose the curves of still golden-green meadows, it took my breath away.

One part of me drove, solitarily ensconced and with exquisite care, another, vaster, part partook in the unveiling of a new, luscious day. I was transported, you might say, in more than one way.

I am certain this non-ordinary perspective was necessary for me to notice, what now has become a commonplace experience: that tell-tale electric tingle, so central to my invention — the manifest surge of Good Time Power.

From there on in all it took was simple electro-mechanics, a bit of IT, and the marketing genius of my wife.

Thus, friends, your Good Time Watch was conceived, gestated and in due time born: Reading, quantifying, displaying and instagramming your dopamine-spills indicating a good time/place for initiating sane and empowered choices.

I am sure it is also no accident that my invention came at the heels of the fit-bit craze. In retrospect, a somewhat pedestrian attempt at clocking precursors to physical well-being.

Still, it did set the stage for the Good Time Watch experience, priming a generation for the next step: mental fitness for enlightened choices.

Today we are celebrating the 10.01 upgrade of that simple gadget with such vast spiritual/political implications. As history has proven, Good Timers soon lose their taste for a cortisol-driven existence, and the icons of stress, anxiety, and yes, despair, previously so addictively prevalent, are no longer populating our collective mental desktops.

I feel blessed to have been the one stumbling upon Good-Time monitoring.The time, it seems, to unleash powers for doing good had come.

To think that the dark, cortisol-driven times almost prevailed … is, well, unthinkable.

Siegfried Haug is the author of I WANT TO SLEEP, a workbook for insomniacs. A suspense novel, BAD SLEEP, caught the interest of a local publisher. Retired now from clinical work and teaching, he lives with his wife, a ceramic artist, in the foothills of the Berkshires. When warmth is hard to come by they migrate to Key West.

Siegfried Haug

Siegfried Haug is the author BAD SLEEP, a suspense novel published in 2019 by Levellers Press. He is also the author of I WANT TO SLEEP, a workbook for insomniacs. Retired now from clinical work and teaching, he lives with his wife, a ceramic artist, in the foothills of the Berkshires. When warmth is hard to come by they migrate to Key West.