Extra sensory pangs

I wanted to blog more this week but I have had some unexpected things happen.
What I thought would get better, because it usually does, is the pain in my ass. (such a privilege having and actual pain in my ass to complain about.) It was getting worse rather than better. After doing the computer work for my job each day and catching up on email and facebook it was just too painful to sit here and type out what was on my mind. Even more difficult to have some humor about it.

What was really unexpected was how these changes would effect my mental states. I tend to look at the world in existential terms anyway so you'd think it would be fun for me. It was/is overall. The turns were unexpected and strong. I knew there would be feelings of hunger. I have begun a list of the various ways hunger let's it's self be known. When I am in a more humorous mood I am sure I and sure I will have a whole riff on it. No what surprised me was the way the anticipated grouchiness has become like a laser beam of not taking any shit.

As you may know I resell the local paper in a town (calls it's self a city, as if) 25 miles away from the city of origin. The newspaper it's self is run in the old school 'fuck the people at the bottom' way. With the impending doom of the newspaper industry they have accelerated their cost cutting efforts creating more problems for me. They seem to be resigned to the fact that sales will never grow. One obvious way to let the newspaper survive another 5 to 10 years more is to only print 3 days a week. This would create a rich paper full of interesting content well worth $1, $2 on the weekend. As it is now it is rarely worth the 75¢ ($1.50 Sunday) that they now charge. Ad space being in short supply they could charge more for it. TV and the Internet are cool but certain ads will always best as a physical object right in your hand. Duh. The latest studies show that only 4 daily newspaper will remain in 5 years anyway.

For what I assume are sentimental reason they refuse to stop being a daily. Instead of cutting production days the next big cuts, it is rumored, will be outlying areas like mine. On Saturday a major supplement (a slick local magazine) that is always included in the Saturday paper on the last Saturday of the month was not included in the papers delivered outside the city of origin. This happened after a week of TV ads telling people to expect the latest edition of the mag. I have been getting calls from upset subscribers for days. I know many more are also pissed.  That was it for me. They try to try to suppress our many outrages with the pall of corporate non-engagement. No more.

This lead to a kind of funny thing that I did doing my rounds of the retail stores that sell the paper for me. One grocery store in particular that specializes in a friendly, 'we know everybody's name greet, charm and engage them' approach, is run by a family of Chinese. They also are big fans of the hyper-neo-conservatism you find on the radio from Rush Limbaugh et al (even after all theses years some people don't realize that he is an entertainer not a reasoned commentator). Weekly when they hit me with that week's outrage my usual response is the bland customer service-ish "Oh, Huh, oh my . . " etc.
One of the people that I deal with there in particular really gets a charge out of the rhetoric. Checking the papers that didn't sell he saw a copy of last Friday's front cover with a big picture of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. He went into this rant all about how this guy is worse than Hitler or Pol Pot, he had a whole list, concluding with "he should be shot then hanged then cut into little pieces" etc. Being a person of little imagination I assumed he was parroting something he heard. My response this time was to say "So you're a right wing nut job?" with a smile in my voice. This stopped him for a minute then he followed up with what also sounded like a quote. "This is going to destroy our helthcare system." I responded with my own diatribe on how the healthcare system is already broken and corrupt at every level, it should be destroyed . . . Also with a smile in my voice I continued to counter every stupid thing he said.

Partially it was that the hunger had me on edge. Also I am feeling very "empowered" at times. That feeling of helplessness, that finally lead to all of this, at last on the run.
One thing I hadn't counted on was how much of an anesthetic, analgesic and tranquilizing effect food has had on me. Thinking about it now I think I must get more of an endorphin rush from eating than most people. Back in my 20's I smoked pot in 'mass quantities' at parties with my friends but just enough on a daily basis to keep down the flow of excess input to my brain. I have intuition, psychic juju or whatever you want to call it in a ratio a bit higher than normal as well. The problem was that, unlike in stories, I have impressions and flashes of things like future events but they rarely have significance later on when whatever happens happens. Not very useful but interesting was when a scene from an old TV episode would flash through my mind. That day or some days later I would see that scene previously unaware that they were even running the old show as re-runs. When I began doing massage full time around age 27 I began losing interest in daily pot, my intuition having something to focus on. After that is when I really began to gain weight. The food induced euphoria, among other things like undiagnosed sleep apnea, damping the brain static.
This is all speculation with other possible explanations, however my lifetime collection of these kinds of events leaves little doubt in my mind. My visit to the ADHD Dr tomorrow will be interesting.