CUP NOT MUG

I broke my first New York coffee cup this morning, and all that means is I lost a first connection to the city, a kind of talisman from my first weeks here, something that personalized my experience.

Months ago, Cara, here friend Laura and I had been in Brooklyn visiting the Metropolitan Transit Authority museum and afterwards had walked over to Williamsburg to get lunch. We were passing a church that was a having a rummage sale in it’s basement and that’s where Cara, knowing I’d wanted a coffee cup since I had sinfully discarded all of mine before my move, had found one for something like 50¢ on a table filled with knick knacks and junk.

It was small, decorated with a simple geometric design, made in the USA and probably manufactured sometime in the mid fifties or early sixties. It held just the right amount of coffee, maybe ten ounces, a manageable amount of hot beverage that makes savoring restricted and more appealing—perfect in other words.

Now, if there’s one thing I have a real issue with concerning how coffee is typically consumed in this country, it’s that it frequently assumes it necessary to have it delivered in absurd amounts that defy appreciation. Mugs (what an awful word, they should just call them steins because they’re about as big and clumsy and stupid as what you’d serve a half-gallon of beer in), are shaped like cylinders, hold enormous amount of fluids, and transfer the any enjoyment of what’s inside the cup to the juvenile broadcasting of kitchy graphics, slogans and logos to the exterior as if their purpose isn’t to savor anything but to humor others who happen to be in your proximity. They are essentially another lowest-common-denominator method of distribution in our culture, that along with Styrofoam containers, plastic utensils, paper cups, plates and cardboard packaging inherently indicates nothing special or of value, as long as it’s served beyond the amount humanly appreciated or necessary in one particular sitting.

Every serving of coffee from that little cup was exactly the right amount and rarely cold before I finished it, as opposed to “mugs” impossible size and demands which could almost never be satisfied unless you truly were a slave to them and their insipid master plan.

So my little cup broke this morning when I knocked it over reaching for something at my work space, an entirely rookie move though I was lucky there was almost nothing in it, a final testament to serving exactly what I needed, how I needed it to be served: tastefully and always appropriate... boo hoo hoo. Just another lesson in the temporal nature of things… don’t get used to anything for very long. So fuck you “mugs,” there’s too many of you to ever break you all; soon you’ll take over all the kitchen cupboards of the world with your banal and evil plan for mediocrity.