Back down the coast for the obligatory long weekend family visit and as always the trip down is filled with trepidation and anguish. For the last few days I’ve been cursing myself for promising to pay this visit for the labour day weekend and it loomed heavy; this thought that I was to spend a couple of days back in familiar territory. I’m not usually one to break a promise and on this occasion I didn’t stray from commitment, however  I really struggled with the turmoil of not wanting to come and the obligatory nature of “family time”. Almost as a premonition, the struggle I was waging with myself was in some way a sign of times to come.

In the course of a matter of hours, since arriving, all hell has broken loose and the picture was vulgar to say the least. Such are the ways of family and I’ve come to expect as much but I never seem to fully grasp the lesson that such visitations instill. The anguish I face, pretty much every time prior to making this pilgrimage into “family values” is invariably filled with despair and often the clairvoyance of statistical averages fulfills the imagined anguish with a striking uncanniness to experience and reality. But do I heed this “sign” or warning? No. That is the trouble though isn’t it? It isn’t morally acceptable to become estranged from the “family” and even when the whole family affair is bordering on the absurd and comical in some tragic sense, we are still bound by the “virtue” of so called family values.

Human beings are such a comical creature and the gods surely have a laugh at the absurdity of our plight. We suffer and struggle with the self importance of our lives even though at the best we are here for only seventy odd years. The universe continues with its 14 billion year old quest to find some answer to the question of why it exists while the gods reign in the heavens overlooking the absurd comedy of the human condition. Perhaps that is why we are here, for the absolute amusement of the gods, like watching some soap opera as they sit eating cosmic popcorn onlooking the frailty of human relationships as they turn to mire because of some trifling event that in the course of things is meaningless. But from where we sit these “events” define or enact the feelings that we hold so dear to our hearts.

Sort of reminds me of this movie, “Gabriel”, which was about the Archangels descending to purgatory to save the souls of those trapped and to do battle with the forces of evil in this never-never world, which in my opinion had a symbiotic parallel to this world, there was an unnerving likeness to the decadence and misery that lies underneath the surface in this reality. As it turns out they become corrupted, apparently acquiring this new found sense of feeling is a crushing experience and one can imagine that in the seedy world they find themselves in that the depressing sorrows and awareness of hopelessness becomes overwhelming even to the purity and longevity of Angels.

Of course at the end of the show the protagonist, the Archangel Gabriel saves puragtory from darkness and allows the sun to shine the light of righteousness but does this always happen in reality? Does the light always overcome the shadowy world we find ourselves in? Or is the light sometimes extinguished never to shine? Sometimes I wonder whether there is some light at the end of this tunnel of family reunion.

The good news is that it is a long weekend coming up. It caught me by surprise, I hadn’t realised that such fortune would bestow the worker this week. The bad news, however, is that I may have to visit the folks, well i mentioned that I might head down on Sunday for the night. I know that there are those people out there who absolutely love their family life and my hats go off to those virtuous souls, however the other half; the destitute and spiritually bankrupt, souls not dissimilar to myself find the ordeal of family responsibility a rather tiresome and bothersome obligation. In truth, the whole family thing and especially the happy family thing is just too hard to bear when one needs to travel half way across the country to partake in fifth commandment bullshit.

It is annoying that for some reason the onus is on me to bring my ass down to see Mum and Dad when it was their choice to move to the arse end of New South Wales. Like a five hour drive just for proprieties sake seems excessive. For what? So I can keep someone else happy. Pure people pleasing, and because it isn’t exactly people in the sense of other people but family – it is somehow transformed into duty, responsibility or obligations because there are blood ties involved. It even seems antiquated in this age of self. What gain can be angled from this antiquity? None! It is purely an indulgence in superficial pleasantries. What’s a selfish old sod like me to do?

Family dynamics and relationships may seem interesting looking from the outside in but when the inverse is true it becomes too close to reality to be at all comfortable. I just wish that the distances involved weren’t so great, having the option to shorten the obligation into a more manageable chunk seems a vision in paradise. Ah well no amount of whingeing will make it go away.