I've been gradually reinstalling stuff lost to my operating system upgrade.  (don't ask.) 

I recently reinstalled AOL Instant Messenger, as well as the new version of ICQ, and that has allowed me to reacquaint myself with a couple chat buds with whom I failed to maintain contact over the last year or so.  The reacquaintance has been really ...well, let me just say it has been very nice.  Isolation can be pleasant in small doses, but excessive isolation just seperates me from everything, always.  That was nice for a while - not needing to accomodate anybody else's needs, or respond to anything outside of me - but the deadness creeps in, and the creator within me becomes despondant. 

I've spent a lot of time there, in isolation, reflexively closing doors without any consideration for what (or who) I was excluding.  It got so tiresome that at one point, I almost closed the final door - with a rope.  That made me realize that what I really want is to stop closing doors. 

But it is opening them that scares me.  Yeah I know, that's just like everybody else.  Only everybody doesn't buy the rope. 

I suppose I'm going to have to do a lot - a whole fuckin' lot - of work on the reasons why I like having doors shut before I can fling them all open without a care.  But to have gotten so far as to have closed them all but one, and then to have chosen quite deliberately to stop closing doors - that reversal is enough, for now. 

My future is all open doors; I might even find occasion to close one, from time to time.  <insert lyrics for tacky 70's song, 'Behind Closed Doors'>