Busy doing this. Hope someone out there likes 'em.

This is a teacher I once knew.

And this is a girl I once knew.

And people pay me to do this. Ha!

But, that's not what I particularly wanted to talk about. I was just thinking tonight about old friends that I don't see now. Or, at least, that I don't see very often.

It's probably my fault, too. After all, there are things called phones that I'm quite capable of picking up and using - but for some reason this year, I haven't been able to. But, that's not to say that I've not been thinking about people a lot. This year's been my big year of change and growth and all that good stuff. This was the year where I - a lowly caterpillar - disappeared into my cocoon, and emerged 12 months later as... a fatter caterpillar. But, a caterpillar with focus and direction. For some reason, to do that, I had to just be on my own for a while. With a few exceptions, like Ellen and Kathryn, I've not really spoken to or seen anyone since Feburary - I've just sort of been on my own, trying to figure stuff out, without anyone around to laugh at me, or make fun of me, or call me a fat, dorky loser, or any of that stuff. I had a lot of things to sort out in my head - hangovers from years and years of being a confused twentysomething. And, I think I've come a long way, and figured out a lot.

But, I haven't seen a lot of people. The hard part about that is that even though I've not done much phoning - neither has anybody else. And I think I've figured that out, too.

See, as I wandered through the total wilderness of my mid-twenties, everyone grew up around me, and I never really noticed. I figured that we'd all be young forever, and would be friends forever, and life would simply go on as it had in the past. But, that doesn't seem to have happened. I ranted and raved a while ago about people getting girlfriends and disappearing into picket fence-land, and it still kind of annoys me that everyone simultaneously up and got married - but maybe I sort of see why it happened. Everyone grew up and wanted normal lives - but I couldn't do that, for a hundred reasons, and when the dust had settled, everyone had changed. Except me.

There are people I used to know that now don't know me - or don't want to know me. And even though I get told to knock it off and not care, for some reason I still care about them. One old, estranged person I used to know in particular still flickers across my memories from time to time - and I wonder if he's doing well. Even though we parted ways bitterly, I can't help but hope that he's not in any trouble, and whenever I'm out and about, every time I see a pair of purple sunglasses, I wonder if that's him - and I wonder if he'd tell me to drop dead if I spoke to him.

Of course, I shouldn't give a fuck either way. As Kathryn once told me, people rarely stay friends forever. Doesn't work out that way.

Ellen makes a lot of sense. She has friends she doesn't see anymore, and doesn't get all bent out of shape about it. Ellen's a different case, though - she has an almost scary amount of strength.

Things are changing rapidly again - 2006 is almost over, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I've built something lasting over the last 12 months. I have a career that is slowly beginning to inflate, and things are changing all around me - faster than I'd like. All the things I've spent time doing - all the study, and the nights spent alone drawing and writing - it's all starting to pay off, and the picture that explains what I've been doing, and why, is slipping more sharply into focus as each week passes.

But there are still ghosts hovering around. I feel like I'm living in the morning after a drinking binge. I was a lost soul from the moment I fled from the burning wreckage of my academic career at Deakin - and it's taken a lot of time to rebuild things from scratch. Maybe that's why I haven't blogged, or whatever you want to call the stuff I once wrote here. There comes a point in your life, from time to time, where you just have to hit the reset button. I didn't want to sit here and write about how much I hate Guy Sebastian, or how Roger Waters stole my soul, or how the earth should be destroyed. I had more important fish to fry. Working on my cartoons. Working on my writing. Building a business. Learning a whole new set of disciplines. For the first time, though, I didn't go through the whole process with my usual suspects around.

Maybe it's just the timing. The people I once knew are at the point where they need to build the lives they're going to be living for the next 20 years. They NEED steady partners and dinner parties, and bar-b-ques, and Friday nights in watching the giggle box. Station wagons and joint bank accounts and shepherd's pies, and Meeting The Parents. It probably doesn't work well for me to interrupt them with my chaotic verbiage and somewhat unorthodox lifestyle - I feel like I'm a hundred years old AND three years old at the moment, and it probably doesn't work well for me to be continually judged and condemned by people who Just Don't Get It.

No matter how much I may miss 'em.

Syd Barrett has passed away. For those of you who aren't wired up that way, Syd was the original guitarist and songwriter for a band who later became known worldwide as 'Pink Floyd'. Syd's band, The Pink Floyd, released two albums of delicate, graceful fairytale songwriting, tempered by nightmarish excursions into the slowly fragmenting psyche of their bandleader, before the entire thing fell apart in a haze of paranoia, drug worship, and schizophrenia.

Later, Syd recorded three deeply upsetting albums that chart his inner apocalypse - becoming more and more dissonant and fractured as they progress, they are a searing portrait of a young man coming apart at the seams. It's not funny, or cool - it's just a very sad spectacle of a once-groundbreaking talent being laid to waste by forces beyond his control.

And then, it was over. He retreated home, and lived in his Mum's house until the day he died. Syd sightings surfaced from time to time in the intervening 30 years, but Syd slowly transformed into a man utterly unrecognizable from his former self. Overweight, dishevelled, and obviously scared of the entire world, Floyd freaks have been clamouring for a peek into the life of their exiled idol. At least now, he won't have to run from their prying eyes.

I remember, back in the seemingly eternal past of 1993, I asked my parents to buy me the Syd Barrett boxed set for my birthday. They did, and I spent many years afterwards listening and re-listening to those albums, trying to unravel the labyrinthine tapestry of Syd's tumbling, scrambled neurosis. Ultimately, there was no great truth to be learned from studying those records - they are aural portraits of a life-crushing sickness. Yet, so strong was Syd's talent, that even while the chaos inside his head had ravaged his abilities as a songwriter, there remained moments of penetrating, pure, shattering beauty.

So long, Syd.

... life is kinda like this.

Concept art. Boo!