I’ve mentioned before that I am the black sheep of my family, at least as far as my mother’s extended clan of yokels is concerned. This is because I was pretty smart as a kid (something these people hate and fear like the plague) and because I was conceived out of wedlock, making me an outcast by their “Christian,” that is tribal, jungle-law standards.
This has led them to formulate a number of legends about me, beginning with the notion that I was gay. My acceptance at an Ivy League college helped confirm this to them, in spite of my previous army service. Anyplace whose workings are a complete mystery to them, as Cornell’s certainly are, would automatically be a den of depravity.
In more recent years, their predictions of failure, death, and prison failed to materialize and I started to do alarmingly well in the financial realm. This was a crisis for the family feces flingers, since solvency is next to godliness for them. They got some traction claiming that my science fiction was pornography but they realized this was unsustainable even for them and they could not bring themselves to believe anyone would make money from such stuff anyway. Then they hit on the way that all bad people make dough these days. They eventually had me re-invented as an enforcer, gun runner, and general evil-doer for the international drug cartels.

This has now boomeranged on them. I had been mystified by how polite they were in our last few meetings, then someone explained it to me: They are too terrified to mess with me in even the slightest way.

Unfortunately my evil brother Judas is smarter than the rest of the pack and does not believe this himself. Sigh. I can still enjoy seeing evil liars being hoist by their own petard, even if I can’t get every last one of them.