I tell you, these people are crazy. I’m surrounded by dysfunction, and I’m not going to take it wordlessly any more.

I have tried to suspend judgment. I have concluded that people read one another, and I’ve ceased harboring negative opinions about the behavior of those around me. But I will explode if I suppress it any longer. I must sputter.

It hardly matters. I’m not likely to publish this and even if I did, it would attract few readers and none who know these characters. I have learned to cherish my nonentity, like I have learned to appreciate ineffective communication.

I’m a hyper-adult who grew up at age 5, so I carry a loud child within me. I do not perceive affect, and I don’t attract it. Nothing but honesty and clarity make sense to me. I love fairness.

I’ve got family members with impulse control problems. A few with anger management issues. We’ve managed to marry into a lot of booze. Self-delusion is rampant. Most of my loved ones seem to crave murkiness or at least think there’s no getting rid of it. They don’t use words carefully or lovingly. Their perceptions are alien to me.

Take Jill.

For the longest time I didn’t think a woman would gratuitously lie about a man’s sexual aggression. Whatever for? How could she live with her self-image after? Sure I could understand a girl who felt she had to lie to family about her sexual activity to save her own life, but I assumed no woman would volunteer an untruth just to make trouble for a man. So I doubted the Bible story about Potiphar’s wife accusing Joseph of rape. And all the other myths about a rejected woman’s perjury.

Then I met Jill. The poster child for low self-esteem. The bar skank with a heart of gold. My cousin-in-law.

She wasn’t my cousin-in-law when I met her. She was my (subordinate) co-worker. I felt protective of her because she was a farm girl set loose in the big city, placed at my firm by my college roommate. I tried to look out for her.

That was hard to do. She moved fast and drank faster. She was heated and hot every night, and filled with remorse every morning. It was hard to watch and it didn’t last long.

She tried to kill herself four months after I met her.

Her mother was worse than she was. I hadn’t even met Marge but I knew from Jill that she liked to drink and flirt and had recently married her third husband, a Latino man between her age and Jill’s. Jill had developed an anti-Chicano bias in her valley school days, so she wasn’t receptive to Jose. After she downed a bottle of sleeping pills with a fifth of vodka Marge called me.

“Jill’s in SF General,” she said. “They’ve got her on a 72-hour hold. You’re going to have to take care of her now. I have a husband to attend to, and he and Jill don’t get along.”

I was beyond astounded. It was the most blatant example I’d yet experienced of parental abnegation. The Greatest Generation: more interested in its own gratification (“we were robbed of our youth”) than in its responsibilities…

What could I do? I picked Jill up and took her to my place. I rolled joint after joint and told her she could end her life if she wished. I pointed out that she was going to get dead sometime anyway, and maybe she should hang on for whatever good days were available between now and then. I made up the guest room for her and she moved in with us for a few weeks. That’s how she met my cousin Jack.

Yes. Jack and Jill. Proof that I’m not making this up; any editor would blue-pencil those names.