Notes from Canada Journal

(I am riding in a car with my sister TORI, being driven by my cousin PIP. Another car cuts us off in traffic.)

TORI: Wow, that guy's a jerk!

ME: Hey, you don't know what that guy's story is. For all we know, like, his baby could be dying or something. He'd be a real fucking tragic figure then, huh? And wouldn't you feel bad?

(pause)

PIP: Well, he'd still be jerk. He'd just be a jerk with a dead baby.

---

So my uncle tells my brother-in-law and I to hop into the van. The new guy looks at me expectantly, and I have to rapidly weigh a number of factors to determine who gets the front seat: on the one hand, I'm an eldest son; on the other hand, he's older than I am; on the other hand, I'm a blood relation; on the other hand (this is now apparently some kind of Hindu god doing the counting) he's married to my elder sister.

Not that the decision really matters -- and the bulk of the problem here is my own paranoia. But the fact that I'm thinking in these terms at all indicated that I'm currently in Canada, and it's the first time I've visited my relatives since performing the show. It somehow failed to occur to me that having produced a script about them (to fairly glowing reviews) would constitute Big News amidst my family. Matt Everett's musings about my relationship with my father have apparently made the rounds, and

eeeagh. May I take a moment to freak the fuck out about this, please? The vast array of taboos I've broken? All the angst and the anger and the profanity? Dear God, have they found my blogs? Exactly how much of my personal life is public knowledge?

Okay, I'm done now.

But being with my family again is a vaguely bizarre experience. After all, they're characters now, having provided any number of key emotional moments or lines of dialogue. I find it strange, how close I feel to them; but then I think, oh. Duh. I spent my summer on the road with them, having taken them to every performance with me.

This has changed my relationship with them in some subtle way I can't quite articulate. But I had to place them within the confines of a very artificial construct in order for that to take place, and I can't help wondering whether or not that's healthy.