I know that voice . . .

. . .it is the voice of the Cylon Imperious Leader!  - Baltar to Count someone or another in the original BSG.

This Count, argued that the Cylons were built a thousand years ago, and for it to be HIS voice, it would have had to have been recorded into the Machine leader a thousand years ago, making him at least a thousand years old.

The allusion there is that "evil" comes in many shapes, sizes and looks, and is in effect timeless.

Last night after exchanging another few less than positive emails with "My only living blood relative" (his words, NOT mine) it struck me that I knew that voice!

I've had, in the years since my life with Earl, an amazing education.  One that all while being amazing, is soul chilling in it's import.  Between Lovefraud.com and my friend Laura, I've had my eyes opened to a whole new part of the 'verse I never really understood or I suspect believed really existed.

"Evil" exists, and it is all at once more pervasive and insidious than I'd ever have dreamed, and more subtle and alluring to one who cannot see.  I dislike labels, frankly they feel like straight jackets for living.  Often preventing life from thriving.  Sometimes however knowing something or someone for who or what they really are, can save one's life and soul.  Now and then, while I am normally loath to label, let alone judge anyone or anything, I must call a thing by it's name.  So that I know, and it knows I have seen through the layers of facade and gazed upon the true face of evil.  It is said that knowing a demon's true name gives one control over it.  In some ways being able to see now as I do, past the veil of lies, shines the light of day on something for my own health, happiness and well being I must, at all costs avoid.

Psychopaths are real.  Psychopaths are dangerous even in small doses and no good can come of them.  Nothing I say or do is going to help them be better people, let them find healing and light, I serve no good purpose by being drawn into their web of evil.  In my life before Earl I knew that evil was real and existed, but I could not, would not see it because I didn't really no what I was looking for. And because I was way, way more innocent than I am now, and always thought the best of people.

My so called "only living blood relative" has been something of an open sore in my life for the last 41 years.  Being a number of years older than him was hard enough.  Being the healthiest of three children my mother had, I was everything that he's never been.  He was born sickly and premature, and my folks over compensated some, then because he has allergies that I do not, my father went on the warpath to keep him from dying.  So to start, he came into the world over protected and being waited on hand and foot.  He craves attention, I was always happy being off somewhere quiet reading by myself.  He was violent, loud and very physical, aggressive, and I was none of these things.  We had almost nothing in common.  He thrived on confrontation and I broke out in hives from it.

He always needed other people to do for him, provide for him, give him things, and even I got sucked into this for many, many, years.  When I think about the money I spent on that child for food and rent alone, I shudder.

We parted company a bunch of years back and I was for a goodly while lost to the world because of Earl.  So of course once out of Earl's clutches I set about finding all the people I'd lost, including him.  It has been, to say the least, a trouble filled relationship, even more so than it had been.  His life has been, to hear him tell it, pure hell in the years I was missing.  My life on the other hand doesn't even register in his version of the universe.

Anyway, I've been having, as I always have, trouble getting along with him.  I won't belabor the details because they are not relevant to where I'm going with this.  What struck me now with these new eyes, this new life I've been unceremoniously thrust into, is that his history is as much a product of his nature as are the problems in having a relationship with him.  He is, for whatever that may mean for him, or what it says about me, a psychopath.  Probably high order Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and given his history of hospitalizations for being a threat, a danger, to others on the extreme end something not just I have seen.  Everything is about him, if one is not actively serving his compulsive need for worship and believing every word he says with complete devotion, you are useless to him.  Question, even in passing any of the grandiose and completely impossible lies that he uses to prop up his fantasy world, he becomes violent and abusive.  When he was fourteen they took him off to involuntary confinement for attacking my Sister and father with a ball peen hammer.  I only wish I was kidding.  I only found out later because I wasn't living there at that point.

He was married, several times, and one of his hospitalizations started as a criminal arrest for assault and battery on his wife.  Because of his history of mental health issues, including the extreme form of bipolar disorder, and his repeated overtures to suicide, an involuntary committal in a psychiatric facility.  He's a mess on so many levels, and like anyone else that's ever been around him, I'd been stuck in the amber of his tale of woe, and his charm.  He's a conman.  Big time con artist.

So over the last three years, I've been increasingly putting him on restriction, limiting or completely removing access to me for his regular period so abuse.  He spins these tales, that anyone who actually lives in this world would question, and then becomes violent and aggressively so in his "defense" of his outlandish claims.  Over time he went from being able to call me at all hours of the day and night because HE needs to be adored and worshiped to only being able to reach me by e-mail and snail mail.  Recently I've cut that back to snail mail only.  Why?  Because even the email had become violent and abusive, all about the grandeur that is him, and how the rest of us were like dust beneath his boots.

It began with my frustration over his pathological need to inflate his own place in the 'verse.  The constant lying, especially the ones that conflicted with reality, or worse, the other lies he maintained as the truth of his life.  He is, in point of fact, a pathological liar.  And then the rest of the patterns of our interactions started to coalesce in my head and heart.  So familiar, so known, and so terrifying.  Everything about my relationship with him, and his relationships with others over his entire life, has been about the greater glory of HIM.

Oh dear God, another?  Yes, he's a pathological liar, he's got health issues galore, he's a charming and consummate bull shit artist, and he uses and then disposes of people who no longer fulfill his needs.  He's a psychopath and I'm on a diet.  A psychopath free diet.

Like most women I dislike diets of any kind, and I go off them now and again because, well, it's what I do.  But I know that voice now.  It IS the voice of the Cylon Imperious Leader, and I'm not so soon going to fall under it's spell again anytime soon.  I have to be rigorous in my diet, I cannot allow myself a moment of weakness, psychopaths, narcissists, are SO BAD for me.  And my brother is clearly one.

So I cut him off from email.  The software is configured at the server level to automatically return unopened, any email he sends my with a big warning on it:  BLOCKED BY SPAM FILTER.

If he really, really needs to reach me, he has my snail mail address, but I rest easy knowing it will never come to that.  Write a letter?  Put it in an envelope and mail it?  That's beneath him because it requires HE do something.  Yeah, I know that voice. And I don't have to listen anymore.