Cheapskate Press? Glad you asked

           Black Mountain, April 28, 2016 (CP) I don’t usually begin a column with a dateline, but I was about to a few weeks ago, and it was pointed out to me that no one in the world besides me knows what (CP) meant. For those of you who’ve read a newspaper or two in your lifetimes, you’ll know that the initials in parenthesis in a dateline identify the newsgathering organization responsible for the story. You know — like (AP)? In the case of this journalistic masterpiece, (CP) identifies Cheapskate Press.

           I wish I could say that Cheapskate Press has the kind of long and glorious history that the Associated Press does, but it doesn’t. I came up with the name when I assembled two dozen old essays I’d found in my file cabinet into a small booklet and took them to the print shop to have a few copies Xeroxed. I wanted to include the name of a publisher in the front matter for that booklet, but the publisher was me and I didn’t really want to put “Published by me.”

           And thus “Cheapskate Press” was born — not as a newsgathering organization, but as a small but noble publisher that no one would ever hear of, an imprint for the struggling literary artists in my neighborhood. I would comb the village (Greenwich) for authentic Ginsberg wannabes, give them a place of their own to howl.

           If you’re wondering about the “cheapskate” part, you have to remember that being on a tight budget for a good portion of a lifetime trains one to be frugal, and that trying to find ways to save money works its way into your DNA. Besides, I believe had Xerox existed in the 1770s, Thomas Paine would have had Common Sense run off on a copy machine, and I wanted to have something in common with Paine.

           As the years went by, Cheapskate Press was getting tired of having nothing to do, so it was expanded to include a news gathering division. Those who knew me thought this didn’t make much sense since (CP)’s proprietor (me) didn’t care much for gathering news (too much like work). For that reason, the new division never actually gathered much news, although there was some good wool-gathering going on.

           By early 2016, Cheapskate Press rose from the ashes as a very real figment of my imagination, and I began to entertain my options for pressing the Press into service. Of course I had to rule out news-gathering because I wasn’t any less averse to work than I’d been years ago. Plus I was old. An incubator of literary masterpieces was also out because I no longer owned an Underwood typewriter, and as everyone knows one cannot write a masterpiece on anything but a manual typewriter.

           Which leaves only this biweekly quasi-masterpiece.

           And then a warning sounded in my head: “How many times can you write a column about writing a column?” it asked.

           Killjoy.

Where did my mind go this time?

When my friend Clarke read my rutabaga column a few weeks ago, she said “It’s interesting to watch where your mind goes.” In case you don’t remember Clarke, she operates the independent test kitchen in western Massachusetts I mentioned in a column last year.

She’s also a fine writer. A semi-retired columnist herself, she sees the world through an artist’s eyes and captures the Berkshires in words the way Frederic Edwin Church did with oils on canvas.

I remember writing my column titled “The writer’s brain comes alive at midnight” that ideas often show up in my head just as I am about to turn off my brain for the night. But not always. Today’s idea took form in the morning, inspiring me to type this: “When my friend Clarke reads one of my columns, she said ‘It’s interesting to watch where your mind goes.’” So I thought I’d see where my mind went.

Well, it went nowhere for almost 32 hours. Mixed in with the usual — you know, meals, shopping, ablutions, sleeping — I spent part of the time wondering why I didn’t write more serious material, something about a major issue mankind is grappling with, maybe get a conversation going. Problem with that idea was, nothing’s going on. It’s as quiet as a graveyard out there. Turn on the news, they’re yawning and talking about 99 ways to fix rutabaga. Rutabaga fries? You gotta be kidding.

Of course I’m kidding. There’s a lot of news noise, but it’s all about the primaries, and I don’t want to write about them. I’m sick to death and tired of the primaries. I’m sick of politics, period. Unfortunately, the entire world is fixated on the U.S. elections, so from Vladivostok to Vienna to Valparaiso and to Valencia (the one in the Philippines) there’s absolutely nothing going on — or so it would seem when you turn on cable news. It’s all about the primaries.

I gave up on that idea and thought maybe I should try my hand at writing beautiful prose, like Clarke does. In a column called “Cathedrals and Grass Angels” she wrote, “We have had a spate of exquisite fall days, the kind that make the heart ache and the spirit soar simultaneously; the kind where the sun turns sun-wilted stalks of corn from gold to burnished copper and filters through the yellow poplar leaves until they glow like miniatures of the star that lights them.”

I don’t know if I see the world that way, but if I do I can’t express it the way she does. The best I can do on the day she describes is, “Think I’ll put shorts on.” No, I don’t have her gift, so ixnay on the beautiful prose.

If digressions can grind to a halt, mine did at about the 32nd hour as I remembered where I’d left off in my work in progress — with the words “I thought I’d see where my mind went.” I decided to scrap the whole idea because some days my mind doesn’t seem to go anywhere.