[Elspode]

FWIW, *everyone's* family is composed of some proportion of jerks, assholes, evil bitches, drunks, loonies and just plain folk. Hell, my upstanding Christian, Deacon of the Church, pillar of the community father in law used to beat the shit out of my wife and her brothers...like, beatings that would get him thrown in jail nowadays. Good thing they don't know that at the county sherrif's office where he is a dispatcher.

My maternal grandparents were battling drunkards, my paternal grandparents gave my father up for adoption, but kept their other kids...when he was six. So he was a drunk who couldn't hold a job, but always dreamed of making the big killing in business. He's now bankrupt and living in a mobile home on the banks of the Sacramento River. My stepfather and his brothers sexually abused my half sister (which we didn't find out about until she was about 16 and he was long gone down the road), my mom had an affair with a married man when I was 10, one of my maternal aunts divorced her first husband, married another guy for 20 years, then divorced him and remarried the first one.

All this to say that there is nothing wrong with you...nothing that the rest of us don't deal with in our history, in our genetics and in those dark places in our minds that we are afraid to peer into.

A word of caution, though...boozing to excess is bad. I know, I did it for 25 years. I promise you, with all due love and respect, that it is bad if you do it too much.

So be good to yourself, man. And remember that you have another sort of family right here.

We're fucked up too, BTW.