Aspergers and a What If romance that did not happen

Yesterday I had dug in a box expecting it to be some of my long-ago stuff but found a bunch of books apparently my mother had saved for me, and that was a bit interesting too. One of the books was my Junior year (Gallup, NM) High School yearbook, "Zill Ho Zhuni 1953"

and I took a photo of the page which had my photo on it.

And looking at that photo this morning, I saw where I missed a chance for maybe a successful romantic relationship back then. She had signed her photo in my yearbook, she on same page as I was; her name was Peggy Brown. I also noticed elsewhere in that yearbook that she was one of the school cheerleaders - which I was not aware of back then - and those photos of her look cute. I ponder a "What if…." I had dated her at the graduation prom instead of Jean M. how different my life might have been; presumably much better.

Thinking back of those high school years, I can see how intensely Asperger's Syndrome I was experiencing, not just the easy schoolwork and craving for knowledge and reading an average of a book a day besides doing my schoolwork; but at the same time I was extremely unaware of my classroom surroundings. Such as, Peggy Brown being there in the classroom.

I now remember a few more details of the very embarrassing event I endured in High School, and how Asperger's affected that. I remember sitting at my desk in the classroom when suddenly Peggy Brown came to me and urged me to follow her. Wow, she wanted me to go with her and I eagerly followed, noticing the classroom was empty except for me, and her of course, as she apparently had specifically come to get me. Empty room. That was odd; but I had not noticed that, before. Anyway Peggy was explaining that all the students were outside registering a complaint about something; it was unclear as to what the complaint was.

Then I found myself in a sea of people milling around; Peggy had vanished and I was dazzled by all the commotion as I strained to figure what it was all about, but I felt pleased to have been asked to participate.

Suddenly a huge man appeared, red-faced with rage; I recognized him as the Physical Education teacher, a subject I did not do because of asthma. His name was Mr. Cox, and I noticed he seemed aimed at me and in an instant he had plowed through the crowd and grabbed my arm and was dragging me through the sea of students milling around, and I found myself sitting in the principal's office, apparently getting blamed for the riot going on. Presumably I got it on my school record that I was a something, a bad person, the only one disciplined because of the student body group complaint. I have no idea what it was all about, even to this day.

And so I can now see better how severely my Asperger's social dysfunction affected me back then; the term "Asperger's Syndrome" did not exist then, and I sometimes was called "a brain" as the characterization of what is now called Aspergers, who were also sometimes called "genius" too. But the extreme lack of awareness of my surroundings, particularly what the people were doing and why, is now getting my attention as I think back on those times.

I probably associated Peggy Brown with that severe embarrassment and is why I did not think of dating her. Could also be that Mr Cox, the P. E. teacher & football coach had spotted the cute cheerleader with me and so pounced on me in jealousy.

Those details might be important, but the main thing for me now is the recognition of my very weak awareness of my social surroundings, combined with a hunger to be involved in the fun things that others seemed to be doing. I am dimly aware of those traits I have even now, but the desire to "be involved in the fun others are doing" also comes with the many memories of the unpleasant results of my efforts to "participate" and so am also now just resigned to living isolated, even lacking a woman in my life.

An insight, that my ability to rapidly assimilate knowledge from books, was related to my "ability" to block out awareness of what was going on around me socially, otherwise I might have been too constantly interrupted by distractions to be a knowledge sponge anymore. Starting in my Freshman year in college, intense distractions were constantly overwhelming me, such as the constant severe tinnitus that started that year. And so far, has never quit distracting me.

And I think about Peggy - who wrote "Love, Peg" in my yearbook, what she looks like now. No longer that cute cheerleader, no more than I the nice looking young man of that yearbook page's pictures. And - the "What If's" are but dust blown away in the winds of time and events, gone to entropy.

Buying a ladder at Walmart got complicated

In idle moments, my mind goes back to recycle past events that did not make sense and might be influencing more recent events. Such an event was one several years ago when I bought a ladder, realizing that I needed a tall ladder so as to deal with overgrowing limbs on a big tree and to caulk cracks in the shingles on my house, that were too high to reach from the ground. I had kept an eye out for such an extendible ladder but at low cost, and had seen one at the local Walmart store, which has been a very welcome source of the many kinds of things I need, and generally at the minimum cost necessary for social security retirement life.

So, in my Asperger's struggle way, I arrived at the Walmart store, and first thing I pushed my shopping cart over to where I had seen an extension ladder in the recent past. Yes, there was one there.

Usually I do my non-groceries items first and then do the groceries and then to checkout counter. But the unwieldy ladder, about eight feet long, would be very awkward to have sticking out from the cart while going back and forth in the grocery section, trying to avoid hitting shelves and people while searching for the grocery items I also needed that trip.

So I then headed for the grocery section and got my groceries, but instead of going to checkout counter, I pushed my full cart of groceries into the back of the large building, where the ladder was. I always have to wander around a bit looking in the huge busy building for even things as obvious as where the ladders were, as I finally approached the now again-spotted ladder stack, I noticed two young women, both unusually pretty for Walmart people, watching me, one of them gestulating at me with an odd look on her face, maybe anger.

I found the ladder, got it out from among the step ladders there, and got it set on the top of the shopping cart, and wound my way toward the checkout registers.

I arrived at nearest the checkout register that was open, which was the one on the far end from the grocery area. There were several customers in the line ahead of me so I waited in line, doing what seemed needed to keep from hitting people with the ladder. But mostly it was boring there in the line, waiting.

Something caught my eye, moving to the side to my left; it was a Latino toddler, proudly holding high a wristwatch in the kind of case they sell them in, and the toddler was practicing his walking as he headed fairly rapidly toward the front of the store, going past me about 10 feet to my left. I idly wondered how he had managed to get a hold of such a thing, must have been given it by an adult, my thoughts puzzled. Then I saw another movement, it was a Latino woman pushing a loaded shopping cart towards the nearby store entrance, and she was clearly looking towards where the toddler was racing in his way on a course to meet her apparently at the entrance of the store. Well, people do all sorts of strange things, in my opinion, and this one had a toddler headed toward its mom with a present. My task was to keep from bumping people with the ladder on my cart.

Eventually I got to the checkout counter; it was a very attractive young woman doing the checkout. I did not think of it then but she probably was one of the two I had seen earlier when hunting for the ladder site; but now in retrospect, it fits a bit better with comprehending social situations. She checked my ladder and groceries out, I paid for it all as usual by credit card, and then I headed out the store, with the task of figuring out how to carry the big ladder in my small car mostly on my mind, along with continuing to avoid bumping things and people with the ladder on the cart along the way to my car.

Now, this would probably have all been forgotten except for subsequent events, including one even this morning, years after that event.

It was one of the very next shopping trips to Walmart, as I was leaving the store with loaded cart, the greeter there asked me what time it was. Well, I usually don't wear a wristwatch anymore, no longer having to use a public transit system to commute; I had to say I did not know.

Subsequent shopping trips to Walmart I noticed a resumption of being stalked by guys in the store, which had faded away from when I had first started shopping at that store. Being stalked by apparently a snoop (or several) while I was shopping was something I had long endured, and while they practically jumped on me the first few times I had shopped at this Walmart - basically the only store I can reach easily from my home - I had ignored them and eventually they were not so up-front about it. Happens when shopping at Safeway too, which on rare occasions I do too, for items I really need and Walmart does not carry, like red grapefruit and figs.

Anyway there was this stalking going on again while I struggled to find my way around the complex store looking for things on my shopping list. Those men typically either pushed no cart or if they did, the cart was empty. And more often than not, when I finally got to the checkout counter, there would be a line and it would get shorter with only me in the back along with a guy behind me with only one item in hand, usually a soft drink bottle carried by the neck as if a billy club, the guy holding a poker face but watching my every move, as I endured the unloading of my basket and paying for it all by credit card. Over and over again, this kind of thing, it is like they never learn.

Sometimes in nice weather and I don't need large items, I will ride my bicycle wearing a Yucca Pack to haul stuff back in; the Yucca Pack I had learned decades ago is exactly the size of a paper grocery sack, and so it holds the same amount.

The first time I rode my old bicycle there, as soon as I got in the store I put the Yucca Pack and bicycle helmet in the cart, and shopped, but even the greeter as I left was making a big deal of commenting that was a nice helmet I had there, as if to point out I had not paid for it. So from then on, I put the old worn Yucca Pack in the cart, but I wore the bicycle helmet all the time while in the store, hoping people would realize I was not stealing it but had it with me when I came in the store. Eventually people stopped giving me the odd looks about the helmet while seeking out and buying groceries. But the interesting thing is that whenever I was wearing the helmet in the checkout line, there no longer was some lean and mean poker-faced guy right behind me holding a soft drink bottle by the neck as if a billy club to bash me on the head with it.

People stopped looking at my wrists as if maybe looking for a wristwatch, presumably the one the toddler had gotten when I was in line waiting to pay for the ladder, long ago. In summers obviously I wore no wristwatch; or if I did, I wore my old trusty Ultima plastic watch with cloth strap, as my acidic skin reacts to metals, ad I had learned decades ago not to wear metal wristwatches and their metal bands.

So then I got began getting deluged with spam email ads for wristwatches; easily deleted each time but they kept coming in and getting past my junk mail filter. A few days later, another one would show up, delete. Going on for years now. In the past year or so, "they" have figured out how to send things using my own email address, and so I get an ad apparently sent by myself, selling Rolex imitation wristwatches.

And, I got another one again this morning, the huge picture of a fancy wristwatch appearing on my screen. Delete; but there seems a pattern in all of this, sorted out of the huge number of small experiences of life, that I need to sift in hopes of learning "what is going on" among the hundreds of social games people are playing endlessly, that apparently due to my Asperger's affliction, I do not have that faculty inbuilt like most people apparently do.

I could get off on a tangent about all that, but this post is not a book, and it's intent was to describe the ladder incident, long a fairly up-front puzzle of possible importance - if a bunch of people are attempting to make people think I am a thief for some reason, I need to beware to not let that happen insofar as possible. But since it is their game, I have little means to deal with it.

Oh, another possible part of this particular puzzle. Often when I checkout at Walmart, the receipt has an ad on it saying I could win a thousand dollars if I fill out an online survey. If the checkout lady was especially nice, I would do that as a rule, and have never won anything thereby. But while the survey which is very long and of multiple-choice options, not allowing anything but what they provide as a possible answer, which one must pick from or the survey won't complete. The now possibly suspicious items come at the end of the surveys which start asking personal questions. Often they have the pattern of asking if I am of Mexican descent; it then also in a separate question asks which race classification I would put myself in, again the Mexican option but also Asian etc, seems redundant per the prior one about Mexican - Latino - ancestry; did I shop with anyone else, and how many people live in my household including myself. So the pattern sifts out that maybe they have identified the toddler with the wristwatch held so high, the Latino mom watching for him, and my ladder being bought with so much struggle, and are attempting to pin that on me. and with the many years of this going on, was the watch and Latinos thing actually originally done intending to be something to pin on me, I wonder; although putting that on a lower likelihood level.

Maybe I will go off on that aforementioned tangent, but in a subsequent blog post. This one is enough is enough already.

But lest I give the wrong impression, I also need to mention that by far, the workers in Walmart are just fine people, and sometimes go out of their way to be nice and even helpful in finding things at times. And the goodies I buy there have been very welcome in my life, perhaps even making it possible for me to live here where I can - barely - afford even my own home. I think the stalkers and possibly also a very few women associated with them, are a somewhat separate bunch, but somehow they are linked to stores.

Pondering about experts in deception

One of the least noble, in my opinion, yet popularly admired traits among some folks, is that those who are "masters of deceit" or experts in deception as part of their professions, whether they work for the good guys or for the bad guys, use a technique for their deceptions that involves careful advance setup of someone in particular to take the blame for the capers of the master of deception.

This fits with the previously blog-explored interaction between those who are bullies, and those social dimwits called Aspergers or Aspies, who tend to take a long time to figure out what socially is going on, and thus are unlikely to catch on to the the master of deception's monkeybusiness. Looking back, I can see where several different guys must have spent lots of advance planning and arranging small events, to set me up as the fall guy, to cover up their capers; and thus I have long noticed at times, that I seem to have a bad reputation and some seem to think I have done some nasties and even am dangerous; in the bigger picture, this is probably keeping the investigators off track and thus the masters of deception freely continuing doing their stuff unobserved.

So the masters of deception use that technique to conceal what they are doing, which apparently would otherwise get them into big trouble, and they also apparently have the nature of being bullies, and as part of that they strive for a high profile of public esteem - which also tends to get people to look elsewhere for who to blame - and some level of obedience to them, which apparently is the point of it all, to expand their reproduction opportunities in the long term big picture's goings on. The naive nature of Asperger's makes them easily tricked into some level of involvement with the masters of deception unwittingly, part of the games ongoing, thus becoming the "fall guy" or "get left holding the bag." And, thus overall part of the drama that lots of people crave to spice up their lives.

I think it is quite a waste of human potential to otherwise be harmoniously constructive. Yet looking back it has cost me some of my best opportunities in life, by its getting others to consider me untrustworthy. It is hard enough to accomplish things in life being an Aspergers social dimwit, without having to endure that too.

So what is this thing called "deception," I wonder to myself. Well, deception, I have read, is part of the instincts of the R-Complex, the part of the brain that runs our physical self. Camouflage in nature, such as the big cats' tiger stripes and leopard spots make them blend deceptively into the environment, enabling them to more easily sneak up on their prey; card players conceal the cards they have been dealt, so as to deceive the other players from guessing what the other players cards are, all part of the card games. It is often part of "winning" by causing the others to "lose."

Probably I could have been taught to do some of that too, but that was not part of my life path; and anyway as an Aspergers naive social dimwit, I probably would have been quite poor at that kind of thing, being relatively unable to comprehend the social games ongoing. Maybe card games I could have been able to do, however; up through High School, I could play chess fairly well, for example. Part of maturity is to embrace all aspects of life, so this is one thing I need to work more on, re that embracing. But, I have got lots of far more interesting things yet to embrace - and yet totally ignoring the antics of the "masters of deception" of past and present, is not very wise to do, wasteful or not.

Bullies seem to be angered by Asperger's men saying they are "too smart for their own good" but now I realize that part of this may be fear of Aspergers as them "knowing something the bully does not know" which is also part of deception games by hiding knowledge from others, to gain advantage over them; I had previously thought the resentment of Aspergers by bullies as being only caused of fear that the Asperger's would betray the bully's capers, either inadvertently or deliberately. Thus, spending lots of effort to set up some Asperger to be the apparent doer of the wrongs the bully is planning to do, not only gets investigators off track, but when the wrath of society - mistakenly - falls on the Asperger, the bully has thus eliminated him as a risk of inadvertent betrayal of the bully, too. This all fits together to me, at least for the moment.

Today is city trash pickup day here, so the theme of this post fits well with the day. Now, on to more interesting and constructive things to do. Maybe with a bit more of an eye for noticing "leopard spots" lurking in the world, however, at the same time; hopefully I can still learn a bit about even those very complicated things.

The pyramid of place

Recent email from a young man who was seeking info on Asperger's - Aspies - ASD people - thinking he himself might be one, and he had found one of my blog posts on the subject. Starting correspondence with me, he had come to the question to me, if hierarchies were the main part of my problem. I replied that only in retrospect was I able to figure out that there had been hierarchical games going on that caused problems; but was not my focus at the time. I awoke this early morning with some insightfulness on the whole subject, an insight that seems uncommonly clear to me, at least right now.

So I write here attempting to describe that insight. Although it has little new that I had not mentioned in these blog posts before, it is arranged more neatly, I think.

I hypothesize that the world of non-Aspies - "normal" people - is made up of people and of who can beat up on whom; a world solely composed of the endless drama of people interacting; that is all.

To the Aspie, the world is made up of "the trees and the stars" (to use the phrase from Desiderata, a document of uncommon wisdom - but maybe wisdom only for the Aspies) and the mountains and the water and the people and the rest of the stuff that makes up the universe, visible and invisible. And each of their natures and how they interrelate. People are just part of all that.

In contrast, the non-Aspie world is only made up of people, and who can beat up on whom is all that counts. Because it is people who take control of everything and share - or not share - what they have acquired to provide the needs of themselves and their chosen others. And thus determines specific survival and reproduction, which makes possible the continuance of the people and the drama.

To the Aspie (at least to the degree I represent a typical ASD person) esteem is related to how well one can do something; and that crystalizes into some focus in life, on which the person prides him/herself as being unusually competent at, whether it be by expertise in tying fishing flies or figuring out nice mathematical summaries of how the world interacts in some way.

And in contrast, to the non-Aspie, it looks to me like their esteem is all about who can beat up on whom, whom is better than whom. It is only the people that count; and their web of hierarchies is formed as a result, determining one's "place".

The Aspie, largely unaware of his/her "place," tends to sometimes wander into other's "place" and thus gets into trouble. It is perceived by the non-Aspies a bit like someone trying to cut ahead into the line at the movie theater, I think; only on a worldwide scale. It is this giant pyramid of "place" that enables them all to function in coordination, taming the urge to beat up and grab away; that if unchecked would have destroyed everybody from the start, and there would have been no people remaining, merely another extinct species. So that hierarchical pyramid is very important. And focus on it is how they survive. Remember their universe is only made up of people, and so that pyramid is made of people. People who come with all the stuff of the universe that they have been able to get their hands on, all just props to their endless drama.

Now all this is from my viewpoint, which here is assuming that other Aspies are a lot like me. Yet the more recent label of "ASD" - Autism Spectrum Disorder - uses "spectrum" to indicate that there is a wide variation among members of the grouping. In my case, I was a bit unusual in that I had no siblings nor consistent peers in my world as I grew up; often having to move to a completely different place in the middle of a school year, losing what few friends I had been able to make in the short time, over and over again. It eventually got to be so painful to lose those friends that I stopped trying so hard to make friends anymore, so I would not sorrow over losing them. As for "who beats up on whom" I was baffled as to why some of the other boys would, for no reason I could determine, assault me physically or assault the things I had made, destroying them; baffling to me and causing me pain and sorrow. Only once - at maybe age of 5 probably - I recall that when some boy began to hit me for no reason, I flailed out with my fists and bloodied his nose and he ran away crying, and I felt a taste of pride in doing that. My self esteem felt different as I thought about that event. But it was soon forgotten in the melee of daily life, seeming a rather useless endeavor, constructing nothing. And it was not repeated. I became a little better at fending off the assaults, was all; but there was no satisfaction in causing hurt to others. I perceived them as being too much like me, and I did not like to be hurt; thus treating them as I wanted to be treated.

(Only much later as an older adult, did I realize that the other boys were seemingly automatically assaultive because they were compelled to begin their "who beats up on whom" quite literally as they strove to climb as high in the pyramid of place from the earliest ages. This insight was reinforced when reading an article recently complaining that some boys were no longer doing "roughhouse;" and thus caused worry that the boys were not quite so male anymore. Presumably "roughhouse" means physically beating on each other and smashing things up - thus establishing a start on their proof of how powerful they were so as to get up to the higher levels of the "pyramid of place." So my experiences with being assaulted by the other boys - sometimes physically, sometimes in different ways - was merely because I happened to be a handy target to assault as another stepping stone in their climb up the pyramid of place. Even later as refinements were taught, such as playing games to beat another person such as the games of chess and monopoly, was slightly modified to have groups pitted against each other; yet according to a set of rules applying to all of them, thus teaching limits as to what they could do in their climb up the pyramid of place.)

Life went on as I learned more about the trees and the stars until I became a young man, and my interest in the opposite sex gathered new kinds of interest in them, more craving for interactivity with the girls. But the girls ignored me, did not seem to notice I existed; yet in high school several of them were coming to class clearly very pregnant, they were clearly involved with other boys in the ways I would like to have been involved with one or two of the girls who I especially admired - yet who ignored me as if I did not exist. Now I realize it was because the girls -the young women - only saw a boy's - a man's - existence in terms of his place in the hierarchy; and my place was so far below as to be out of sight. Eventually I decided - perhaps from the car ads - that having a car, a nice car, was key to attracting the girl. And that kind of thing was explored from then on, somehow getting possession of things that hopefully would make me visible to the cute girls. It did not work well - now I realize the women were only seeing the position in the pyramid of places, and they wanted to tie up with a guy as high up in the pyramid as possible, to share in his abundant goodies in hand.

I write this because it may be useful to see from a different point of view. Water, to a land dweller, may be nicely described - it is wet, it splashes, it quenches thirst, it is H2O, it rains, it is clear and muddy - etc; yet to a fish, a being far more intimately involved with water, who yet may not even be quite aware of the existence of water. So I write this a bit like the land dweller, trying to share insight with the fish, about water.

Naively thinking that the fish would have any interest at all in my opinion about water. Their endless drama is most likely about other things.

Laughter is a tool to harm or to heal, you pick

Laughter is a tool; and like any tool, it can be used to build up beautifully, or to tear down destructively, depending on the motives of the applier. There is an old saying that "Man is the only animal that laughs and kills for pleasure." So with that sobering recollection, it seems wise to evaluate this thing called "laughter" which is loosed upon the world of people.

Laughing is relational, such as "laughing at", "laughing with" and "laughing for."

Laughing-at is basically a little assaultive, causing separation and provides ego sense of superiority by tearing down that which is laughed-at, thus raising the laugher up above the assaulted.

Laughing-with provides a special way of uniting cheerfully with other people; children often do this instinctively. It provides a sense of togetherness, acceptance, and of being OK with the group.

And laughing-for provides psychological and physiological benefits by the processes of doing laughing for the healing it brings to one's own well being. The physiological processes of laughter amazingly stimulate the body-mind to relieve stress, produce endorphins for comfort, and activate the immune system, better well being all around. And for free, too; but oneself has to do it to gain its benefits. It is a do-it kind of thing to make it work.

As I grew up, the comedian Bob Hope was my hero. He brought laughter into my life, about the only time I laughed. The wit he displayed as he told jokes which often "poked fun at" himself, provided a way of being that felt nice to me. A few others came along too, such as Jerry Lewis; all were bright times in my otherwise struggle of unknowingly-Asperger's life.

In High School I shifted toward escape into science, philosophy, and science fiction adventures; and gradually the contact and attention with laughter drifted away. Pity, as laughter could have helped me through the even tougher times that were coming up for me.

The few jokes my wife of a dozen years in the 1960's got etched into my mind and after she went on to greater adventures, I found I was living out her jokes as the butt of her jokes now being personalized. Amazing how powerful her ridiculing laughing jokes were on my life even decades after she was gone.

I learned about deliberate laughter for health in the early 1980's in a sermon by Dr. Robert Scott in San Jose, but my feeble efforts to pass it on to my then-girlfriend's rather tough teenagers was just met with cold stares; and so the usage quickly was lost. The turnaround for wholesome usage of laughter in my life was when I happened to attend an introductory workshop given by Dr Kataria, on Laughter Yoga, in Pasadena one evening. The experience was a struggle, as all new social experiences are to one who copes with Asperger's Syndrome; but the overall effect seemed desirable enough that I then joined the Pasadena Laughter Yoga Club, meeting Friday evenings for an hour of group Laughter Yoga instruction and practice with others.

The Laughter Yoga Club experience made amazing changes in the way I related to other people, although as the days went past between Friday evening meetings, I faded back to more like I was before; but some social relational benefits lingered on.

The Pasadena Laughter Yoga Club was led by Sebastien Gendry, another fortuitious happening. Maybe Saint Bob Hope is watching out for me.... Sebastien took note of my Asperger's social problem, as well as my computer skills, so after I had to move away due to excessive housing costs in the Los Angeles area, he stayed in touch via email and eventually made good his suggestion that I contribute to his Laughter Yoga website he was planning back then.

Now I do a small role on the laughangeles.org website, moderating one of the forum sections, which gives me a sense of purpose while located out in the almost-affordable desert boonies beyond access to the refined experiences of the Natural History Museum research work in marine biology that was my other fascinating activity back then. This internet-accessed job requires me to look over the internet's findings where "laughter" is mentioned, and provides reminders of the many ways laughter is experienced by various kinds of people. Most of them still do the "laugh-at" kind of laughter.

Anyway, I can still remember the process of "laughing-with" others for the laughing-for well-being benefits of every one of us. Nobody or no thing the butt of any jokes, either, just pure healthy stuff for everybody. Really different from the far more frequent derisive form of laughter so prevalent elsewhere. Echoes of that experience still inspire me to sometimes do the motions for Laughter Yoga exercises here in my lonely old house, although with only reflection of observing parakeet's appreciation, it is a bit of struggle to reconstitute the laughing-for laughing-with experience. I feel sure my parakeet would do the clapping of hands patty-cake-like with me per Laughter Yoga protocol, if she had hands instead of wings to do that, as she chirps and hops around excitedly when I do the Laughter Yoga motions and sounds in front of her open cage door. Well, sure, my antics are probably only a little more interesting to watch than the blank side of the refrigerator that is her normal only thing to watch during the day.

Jim Cline