Re knives and rumor-making

Am posting this from a hunch someone might need to know it.

Although my Asperger ways are unacceptably slow for normal social group interactions, those Asperger ways spend endless effort to make sense of it all in hindsight, hoping that will help in the future (but rarely does, people play endless variety of games socially.) Puzzling over people's behavior often does come up with viable patterns, however.

One such pattern that seems to have been consistently sifting out in my personal experience especially in my new home town of several years now, corralling enough commonality to provide a guesstimate that is well over the dividing line between paranoid eeks and real danger signs. A consistent pattern sifting out of the murk of people stuff ongoing for many years, seems to have to do with knives and my shirt-pocket, along with many people's quick reactions as if to implied threats to common folks per churning of deliberate rumor mill.

And a pivotal scene - with much context before and after that would take very long to describe - was when I was working in Colton, CA as a technician in test & repair of garbage dump vapor measuring instrumentation. Lots of prior context stuff leading up to the moment, but minimum would be to say that the technician I had been paired with for a long time, who everybody did not want to cross, kept taking the Xacto knife from my workbench; he had one assigned to his, no need to take mine. (I once found one of the xacto knives hidden in an instrument file folder, note.) Tony R. was his name; of boxer family genes, karate training and work experience in underground commercial security activities, why he was tech I don't know, but I had to learn my job from him insofar as he pleased, what a setup by the guy high in the Arco building in LA where I had to go for interview, desperate for a paying job.

There in Colton, Tony had a group personnel phone list tacked up in front of his workbench full of X-acto knife slashes, and he told me that he would throw it and stick me in the back, once when I walked past his bench. He was good at sticking it into things from a distance. But I needed an xacto knife to do some of the repairs on the electronic circuitry, an essential tool for a tech as well as for an artist.

Finally one day when shopping I bought a different kind of xacto knife, nice plastic handle with pocket clip instead of aluminum too, and found a ball point pen top that would fit over the blade and kept it in my shirt-pocket along with my other pens and notes. Tony even once asked to borrow it from me out of my shirtpocket, after disappearing the aluminum one I left unused on my bench. Tony also was at odds with the head salesman Jim McD.

So one day at work I was walking through the room as Jim McD too walking in my direction, and when he was about to pass me he suddenly reached over and grabbed my xacto knife out of my shirt pocket, pulled the cap off, turned and held it high toward what seemed to be just a wall, saying loudly to see it, apparently to no one there. Now I realize over there must have been a camera; and furthermore that very scene is likely to have been played to a large number of people who are now afraid of me (instead of afraid of Tony R., an Al Capone admirer.)

This would explain a huge number of things that have been going on for several years since then. People tend to consider Asperger people as "different" so are easily swayed by contrived appearance justified false rumor; and having the set-up video of shirtpocked X-acto knife - not knowing why it was there - might be the clincher for people. Rumor-making properly fanned, can get nasty.

Yes, this fits quite well with subsequent happenings much too many times and even following me to my new home area, even to the church I now attend, only one little church of that denomination exists here, easy to predict I would go there.

Of course, why go to all this trouble, by those who pull strings? Probably like salami, lots of ingredients. No need to go into them here to an already bored reader, if any; and even I know I would have to journey through paranoid-land in search of clues that seemed to fit with other pieces.

Meanwhile, life goes on; even though occasionally encountering people who look at me scared and furious, sometimes coldly calculating too. What fun, yuck.

Jim Cline 20080915