The Mug Show




For the blog – mugs

Originally uploaded by idyllopus.

Saying Yes informs that The World’s Fair is wanting to know what kind of mug you drink from for the purpose of interpretations of the cultural and environmental philosophy of your mug. The World’s Fair has a set of questions and well, sure, why not.

1. Can you show us your coffee cup?

Sure. They’re not secret, sacred grails that produce coffee spontaneously. As you can, see they’re perfectly mundane cups. I have to show three rather than one because I have an outside the apartment cup and a pair of in the apartment cups that I use depending on how I’m feeling. For me, the indoor cups are a pair and meaningless without each other. In other words, if I lost one, they would cease to be MY CUPS!@#! Not yours, but mine.

2. Can you comment on it? Do you think it reflects on your personality?

See that dent in the side of my Caribou cup? The Caribou cup is about eleven years old (maybe ten going on eleven) and was a gift from Marty. It reflects my personality in that pre-H.o.p., when I was walking home from work and crossing one of Decatur’s scarier intersections, on foot, at night, I accidentally dropped the mug. Despite the fact it was night and the intersection was dimly lit, and traffic had begun to move (one of those several point intersections that gives you two seconds to haul your ass across the road which means I was running) I stopped and flung myself back a lane to grab the mug and race off the road. “This is stupid,” I thought when I was doing it, but I counted on fleetness of foot and adrenaline to preserve my hide. This reflects my personality to the degree that I’m a dedicated and loyal sort, some times ridiculously so. And kinda stupid. Because it was stupid to retrace my steps and grab the mug (which was dented by its fall that day). But it was an important one to me, a gift from Marty during really strenuous and impoverished times. I had the same sort of ambition to preserve the mug as I had the day Tuesday, when a new puppy, slipped her leash and ran into a busy street with oncoming traffic. I could tell I’d a split instant opportunity to race into the street and grab her and keep running, but only if I kept running. I was running even as I was thinking about it and scooped her up without stopping and I couldn’t have been more right on target in my estimating the safe outcome of this risk, thankfully. I’d just lost my dog, Vanessa, to illness, and I wasn’t ready to lose this new puppy which I’d just pulled through Parvo (we’d been told she had been vaccinated but she came down with Parvo immediately).

I would totally kill H.o.p. or Marty if they ever ran into the street, unless it was Marty running after H.o.p., who knows better as I’ve taught him since he was knee-high that streets are dangerous places and demand great respect. If either one of them stopped on a busy street to retrieve a mug I’d scream at them about it for the next ten years. And these days if I lost my Caribou cup in the street I’d let it lie there, because I wouldn’t want to be a bad example to H.o.p., plus it’s eleven years old and you can’t expect a stainless steel mug to last forever. Anyway, this reflects my personality in that I might damn you for things that I do or have done.

The other two mugs are my indoor ceramic mugs, about four years old. Some times I’m Marvin the Martian and sometimes I’m the Tazmanian Devil. I need no others, except for the cup with snowflakes on it that a sister gave me for Christmas with a bag of cocoa and so I always drink my nightly Winter cocoa in that mug (because I’m a dedicated sort that way). Anyway, I purchased the Marvin and Tazmanian Devil mugs myself and I suppose they also reflect a certain impact of animation on my psyche preceding H.o.p., and certainly augmented by H.o.p. I used to be able to mimic the voice of Marvin the Martian dead on, and entertained H.o.p. for quite a while with this. H.o.p. is the only person in the world for whom I’ll do Marvin the Martian. Because I’m shy.

3. Do you have any interesting anecdotes resulting from coffee cup commentary?

Do I have any interesting anecdotes resulting from coffee cup commentary? No. I’m only now giving my coffee cup commentary and not enough time has passed for interesting anecdotes to accrue.

Oooh! The World’s Fair means do I have any interesting anecdotes to do with anyone else ever looking upon my cups and feeling moved to say a few words on them.

No. No one has ever made any observation on my cups. Not the Caribou one that I carry with me everywhere outside the apartment, nor my inside the apartment cups.

I do have a fun caribou story though. As in real live caribou.

3. Can you try to get others to comment on it?

Sure, I’ll do so by placing all this on my blog.

P.S. I just realized that nothing I’ve related has anything to do with “for the purpose of interpretations of the cultural and environmental philosophy of your mug”! How self-serving and thoughtless of me!

Uhm….I had no environmental philosophy working behind the acquisition of any of the cups. I’ve held onto them a while and that has to do with sentimentality and also a belief in using something until it’s all used up and it’s time for something new. This has its drawbacks in that there are very fun cups out there that I’ve never considered purchasing only because I didn’t really “need” them.


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4 responses to “The Mug Show”

  1. Jennifer Avatar

    I’ll comment! I’ll comment!

    I like your mugs. I could have commented on a number of mugs, but was specifically asked to comment by *cough* Pinko *cough* on the mug I got from his place. 🙂 I’m fine with that.

    I do tend to go through phases of favorites. One day it will be a shape that appeals to me, the next day, a feel. On some days, it’s merely the one that is available or the one that will hold the most. On those days, the coffee pot could be my mug de jour.

  2. Jennifer Avatar

    I forgot, what’s the real caribou story?

  3. Idyllopus Avatar

    I divulge too many secrets. Actually, I wrote about it in “Unending Wonders”.

    * * * * *

    Chance could smell Little America in the air–and the windows were closed. Like an empty tent radiant with leftovers of spiritual revival, no god talking, folding metal chairs the only witnesses lazing easy back before a vacant podium. Bang out of the night the bird’s figure would suddenly appear black on black out of the ancient Wyoming sea, smelling of rock salt, glance at Chance and the Ferrari as it broke free its Little America ropes to stride back into the desert. Gave Chance the chills, the penguin released, diving back into the desert black.

    Chance leaned forward to rub the tummy of the penguin compass in a gesture of thanks for the good luck and salutation, hello great Emperor penguin, after all these years soon again we shall meet. Seventeen hundred miles come and gone since departing Valentine, she was about to attain the foot of her mountain, the one every individual has to ascend during their lifetime.

    Faith was suddenly Chance’s best buddy, grabbing her arm, pointing past the headlights into the looming dark, yelling, “Stop! Stop!”

    Chance pressed the brake to the floor.

    They whipped around twice.

    Came to a screeching halt beneath a caribou crossing sign.

    Out danced a young buck, on cue, an initiation rite of some kind from what the humans could tell, urged on by another caribou off stage right. It cavorted, ha-ha tra la. Then leaped off the road back whence it came, beyond the sign, back to its friend, whereupon they disappeared into the dark.

    “What in the hell was the ballet about?” Faith asked Chance who, still breathless, sat with hands melded to the steering wheel.

    Squeal of brakes again. A curiously delayed echo or a Ford pick-up in a desperate fight to avoid colliding with the rear end of the Ferrari.

    Crunch went the hitch receiver mount storage box sticking out of the Ferrari’s rear.

    Whap went the Ferrari into the sign of the leaping caribou.

    * * * * * * *

    Taken out of context it doesn’t mean much but neither does the base to the story mean much taken out of context.

    The difference between fiction and reality. There really WAS a caribou. Only it was in Idaho. Dead of night. We screeched to a whiplash-inducing halt. It performed its ballet on its curious caribou stage before our car’s lights. Haha tra la. Like it did this all the time. Like it was a caribou comedy act and the caribou crossing sign gleaming bright-orange to the side was its vaudeville card. Then rejoined its buddy on the side of the road and they bounded away while we sat staring, stupefied.

    No one rearended us (meaning Marty and me, and we had already been to Little America, weren’t driving toward it).

    We sat on the road too long, mouths agape, then a truck pulled up behind us and we realized we were stupidly sitting at a vulnerable bend in pitch black and we moved along.

    Of course I know people with more interesting stories. Like the band that met a Canadian moose. And we’ve known people who have ended up with deer road kill on the hoods of their cars.

    But this caribou was a prankster dancer. An animal behavioralist would tell me otherwise, but it was a prankster dancer…that had watched too many episodes of Twin Peaks.

  4. Jennifer Avatar

    “But this caribou was a prankster dancer. An animal behavioralist would tell me otherwise, but it was a prankster dancer…that had watched too many episodes of Twin Peaks.”

    Skinner didn’t know everything.

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