When you are born into and remain, until the present day, in a situation that is strange and incomprehensible, people like to classify it as fate. I think this is a superfluous leap into the fabulous and illogical. To me it has always been that quaint and sometimes terrifying social unit we call The Family.
The Russian Formalists sometimes referred to a concept they termed the defamiliarisation of the familiar. It states that the function of literature is to defamiliarise our everyday existence so, like satire, it makes us acutely aware of what we miss due to habitualisation.
I don’t need literature. I find my family so exceedingly strange, so mind numbingly bizarre that to attempt to defamiliarise them would be cause enough to send me into the Long Downward Spiral of No Return.
Case in point: We were driving back from the city the other night. I was distracted by one of those wonderfully pale winter sunsets where the sky simmers rather than burns. Silhouettes in the distance like Japanese etchings. Black on yellow, fine lines that taper off into the infinitesimal.
I had switched off to wonder about the nature of existence while looking at this finely packaged gift of nature, almost on the verge of once again believing in a divine creator when I just had to listen to the conversation between my dad and brother.
Brother: Oh yeah. The owner of ___ (a business) just bought a Ferrari.
Dad: Impossible. A café and he owns a Ferrari.
Brother: It’s true. ____ knows the owner and I’ve seen it parked out of the front of his café.
Dad: Bullshit. You telling me a guy selling coffee at 3.50 a pop earns enough to buy a Ferrari. He’s dealing drugs.
Brother: Come off it. His business is legit. If he dealt drugs I would know.
Dad: Really. You would know huh?
Brother (obviously uncomfortable at this juncture): Not really. People I know would know. Anyway, that other guy who owns _____(another business) just bought a Merc.
Dad: Drugs.
Me (interjecting): You telling me that any successful person who buys a luxury car is a drug dealer.
Dad: Wouldn’t surprise me.
Me: What about Frank Lowy (owner of Westfield, a highly lucrative shopping centre company in Australia and overseas).
Dad: I’m telling you, it’s a front. (I guessed he meant a front for, you guessed it, drugs.)
Brother: Talking about drug dealers, you know there are dog dealers in Rio (de Janeiro, Brazil).
Me (distracted, still in awe at the sunset): Of course there are drug dealers in Rio.
Brother: Not drug dealers, dog dealers.
Dad: Why the fuck would they have dog dealers?
Brother: I’m not kidding. This guy in a car pulled up next to me on the street and offered me a dog.
Dad: Sure it wasn’t drugs, I’m pretty sure you mean drugs.
Me: Yeah, I’m pretty sure to. Dogs – no. Drugs – yes.
Brother: No. A dog.
Me: Doesn’t surprise me. In a city of apartments and where being able to afford a maid at 200 a month is a sign of wealth, a dog’s pretty much a status symbol, kinda like a Merc. You can’t feed what you can’t afford.
Dad: All the drug dealers there own dogs.
Brother: For god’s sake. Not everyone’s a drug dealer. He offered me a German Shepard for 50 Australian.
Me: Should have taken it, fed it on human flesh and set it loose on the tourists.
Dad: I bet you anything the dogs are on drugs.
Like I said at the beginning – I give up. This isn’t fate, this is family. You’re stuck with what your given and the Fates be damned, blood and its permanence is the real worry. Thank God the Russian formalists haven’t gotten a hold of my Family.
