Behold a Coffee Mug

The interconnectedness of things

I’m going to talk about a coffee mug.

Back story. In April 2019 I’d been in Chicago for a few days and was heading home to California. I’d booked an early flight as I’m maniacal about getting to my destination by early evening, latest, so I can have a beer and something of an evening before retiring for the night. I freakin’ hate arriving somewhere at, say, 9:17pm, and will tolerate very early rises to avoid it. I was additionally at the airport a tad before I needed to be (this Dad-style tendency drove my son nuts for years, though these days I’m seeing reassuring signs of him wanting to get there with at least a minute or two to spare), blinking and yawning and keen to be home.

However. Donald fucking Trump chose that day to fly in to Chicago.

It can hardly have been on a whim, so they must have been prepared, but the plane landed late or something and in any event all air traffic had to stop before, during and after his visit. This flummoxed O’Hare and so my flight was canceled, along with many, many others. I spent six hours in the departure zone of the airport with a LOT of other grouchy people sitting on the floor in corridors and trying to buy sandwiches and bottles of water from places that’d already sold out, all of us universally wishing ill upon Trump, before things loosened up and I was able to piece together a journey home, albeit via an overnight stopover in Minneapolis.

Ugh, I thought.

It turned out, however, to be better than okay. I flew the first leg, then wheeled my bag out of Minneapolis airport to the nearest hotel, the Intercontinental, which I’d pre-booked by app and which turned out to be very close indeed, I mean, literally yards away. The hotel was small but the room was comfortable and I spent the evening having a very serviceable burger and a number of local beers in the company of other random travelers while chatting with the capable and characterful young lady running the Bradstreet Crafthouse bar, who somehow managed to give this airport hotel dive the vibe of a cheerful downtown pub you’d actually go to on purpose. All in all, a surprisingly pleasant evening.

Next morning in the airport I picked up this mug as a gift for my wife. Not (just) because I’m the most boring husband in the world, but because I thought she’d like the picture and colors, and also she appreciates a really big cup for her tea ( I have surprisingly strong views on the subject, and prefer a much smaller one).

She did like the mug, and it’s in regular rotation.

My point?

All objects have a story attached. All objects are, in fact, stories. And through this they are woven into the fabric of the entire world.

As we’ve seen, though you’d never have known unless I told you (which is why the left-behind possessions of deceased elders are so mournfully inexplicable), this mug involves Donald Trump — because it would not have entered our lives without him — and yet is one of the people who I most loathe. It also attaches to my best friend and his partner, however, because I’d only been in Chicago in the first place because Steve was coming from the UK to go to the Windy City book and pulp fair and he said “Why not fly up for the weekend and we’ll hang out and drink all the beer?”

This is not the kind of offer I turn down lightly, especially with Steve. I met him thirty-plus years ago purely because he’s a horror expert and anthologist and the irascible epicenter of British genre fiction, and also published my first short story, The Man Who Drew Cats. I’d sent the story to him because as a newbie writer I’d been given a tip by another friend called Nicholas Royle, who I met when — fairly soon after college — I started working for an organization called the IVCA. Though the IVCA turned out to be the trade association for the makers and commissioners of corporate video, I’d applied there because of a misunderstanding: somehow my mother had heard about the company from a social work colleague and (wrongly) believed it to be a production company. She knew I was (vaguely) thinking of trying to get into TV, and suggested I see if they had a job. I started as a temp data inputter but then somehow wound up organizing their events including a huge awards ceremony and ultimately took over their graphic design needs too.

It was this employment that kept me housed and fed while I started writing short stories and my first novel, Only Forward, and also led to me meeting my wife, when the boss of the IVCA left and I wound up doing freelance design for his new firm, where Paula worked. We’ve been together over thirty years now. The realm of Jeamland in Only Forward is called that because I happened to walk past a garment wholesaler of that name in a street near the IVCA offices, and thought it sounded like ‘Dreamland’ if said by a child.

Thus so many things — including meeting the love of my life — happened only because my mother had misunderstood what a company did. And therefore that mug with a duck on it, oddly, links with my mom, though she’d been dead for fifteen years when I bought it. It also connects with anybody who voted for Donald Trump, because otherwise he wouldn’t have forced me to spend a night in Minneapolis. And then with the political history of America over the last several decades.

Not to mention the history of pottery.

And tea-drinking.

And...

I fell in the habit of this connection game years ago, after reading something by... hmm: I think it was probably Ouspensky rather than Gurdjieff himself — whose prose approaches Judith Butler levels of impenetrability — but it’s probably more likely to be Colin Wilson, the inspirational writer about the occult, human consciousness and all things weird that I spent many years devouring, and who wrote in depth about both those guys. And who, as a sidebar, Paula and I once spent a weekend drinking heavily with in the South of France, along with Brian Aldiss, when the three of us were guests at the same book festival back in 2001. (Heck of an event, that one: the highlight was the Saturday night, when we attendees were led through the small town by candlelight like some odd medieval procession (or preparation for human sacrifice) to a field by the river, where we feasted on seafood prepared in huge pans and there was much drinking and dancing. Paula, just so you know, has cut a dash with Brian Aldiss, both of them quite drunk, and both utterly splendid).

Brian Aldiss and Colin Wilson, photo by Michael Marshall Smith

Anyway. Whoever I got the idea from, I believe the initial example was a matchbox, but you can do it with anything. You’ll likely do it already, albeit unconsciously. We all do, all the time. We recognize things because we’ve seen them before, and they make sense when we see them the first time because they’re intimately related to any numbers of other things that we’ve previously encountered.

We understand the world through linkage and metaphor. Objects do not stand alone, ever. Each and every one is intimately related to others, and via those exponential connections, to everything else in the universe.

You can do it simply and (too) quickly, by recognizing that a matchbox was created by humans, and therefore connects out to everything else that our species has (for better or worse) done. Or more slowly and interestingly (bear in mind I have quite a low threshold for finding things interesting) through shorter-range connections. Who made the first match? This particular box was made of wood — where did that wood come from? How did it get to the factory? Where’s the factory? Who built it? Who are the employees? What are they like? What’s their favorite music? Then there’s the label on the matchbox. What colors are used? Why? What else do we see in that particular orange? Why? That typeface... where does it sit in the progression of graphic design? Is it modern? Is it older? If it’s older, is that because they haven’t done a re-brand in a while, or is it an attempt at a retro vibe? Who made that decision? How and why? Is that person married? Who to? Who designed the original type? What else has it been used for? Of course we won’t know the answers to most of these questions. But the answers are out there, and so therefore are the links. And they go on without end.

I almost never get bored. When I do, it’s because someone’s making me do something that I don’t want to do — as with this morning, when I had to go to the (to be fair, very efficient) DMV, to renew my drivers’ license. If there’s literally nothing else to do, I play the connections game. It feels more real than doomscrolling.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I don’t think there’s a moral, necessarily. I was originally merely talking about a mug, partly because I’ve just finished one piece of work and need to warm up my fingers and refresh my brain to switch to the next. But everything connects, and this is merely through considering inanimate objects (with whom, I’ll confess, I form oddly strong bonds: I say goodbye to hotel rooms, out loud).

Imagine how interlinked everything is — that we are — when it comes to humankind, with our shared (or fascinatingly contrasting, interwoven and mutually-influencing) histories and cultures and languages. We are all interconnected to the point where, for simplicity, we might as well be considered as parts of the same thing. Yet we pretend that we’re not, and spend so much time dividing and fighting.

That’s weird, and it’s a shame.