The Autobiography of a Cup of Coffee by Andrew Shaw-Kitch

I was brewed in Monterey, California. From where the beans that supplied my conception came I cannot be sure, though I can only assume them to be from the parts of the world where the climate is inclined to produce coffee beans.

I was given to Andrew Shaw-Kitch on May 3, 2005 in a cream colored ceramic cup. It was he who bestowed me with the generous amount of half and half, without stirring afterward, that gave me the lighter, swirling color I had during our time together, the state in which I am most consistently remembered. Andrew Shaw-Kitch and I joined the artist Jaymee Martin and the famed Monterey literary figure John Steinbeck at a table outside. It was a metal table lacking character onto which Andrew Shaw-Kitch placed me. He then picked me up again from my handle with his right hand and took what would not be considered a sip nor a full-fledged drink, but what may only be referred to as an indefinable idiosyncratic ingestion, one that could not be attributed to anyone other than Andrew Shaw-Kitch. To go back to all the first times.

Jaymee Martin showed Andrew Shaw-Kitch the products of a recent photography collaboration with the Monterey sculptor Andrew Herbig. The pictures were not showed to me. I gathered from the conversation that Jaymee Martin and Andrew Herbig went to various Monterey landmarks and took turns photographing the other who was lying face down on the landmark. Andrew Shaw-Kitch commented that the pieces successfully ironized the notion that an artist has the best perspective on the objects they present to the world, as illustrated in the comically close view either Jaymee Martin or Andrew Herbig had on the Monterey landmarks. This was the essence of Jaymee Martin’s work. She told him he was completely wrong. It was about the crippling despair of living in a town whose aesthetic was defined by seeing beauty in gaudily lit seascapes, as opposed to looking the other way and seeing the ocean and its splashes and undulations and hearing its constant attacks upon the shore.

John Steinbeck whose fame was much more widely acknowledged was nothing more than a voice as recorded by an actor from Carmel in a wax museum on what is now known as Cannery Row. It was renamed for the novel years after his death.

Andrew Shaw-Kitch said that this moment could only come into its full worth if it was to be described in my autobiography, but that I wouldn’t do it. By this time the excitement I gave him in this possibility could not be differentiated from what he himself was generating and the barrier between the outside world and its internal biology disintegrated until we both were molecules bumping into one another delightedly howling that the moment was over while knowing that it could never be.