Thoughts in the Head vs. Thoughts on the Paper

They're different, for one thing.  Thoughts on paper, no matter how eloquent or sophisticated, have to sort of be put down one at a time to maintain some basic transmittable quality (so others can read them and understand and at least agree on what they say even if not what they mean).

Thoughts in the head lunge and rush and stagger and fall, get bloated and then, they get the shits.  They can do that on the page too, sure, but it is different when you write them down, harder in some ways because they might not seem as big as they were when they pinged around the aluminum tennis court inside of your skull.  It is harder to communicate the lunge rush stagger quality that you feel when you think thoughts once you write them down.  A basic forumla has somehow changed even though we'll allow ourselves to feel that we can work through fairly major problems solely internally.  At some core level, the reason I'm writing this is to work through some of the pinginess that echoes in my shadow  on a daily basis.  I'd like to, you know, understand the parts of the court that give a little, where I should aim and how high, too, all that grandoise shit.  Because let's face it, no matter how much we want to, life is the challenge to improve.  That's all it is.  And I'm not talking about it from a societal level, like generational improvement, and I'm not condensing it down into goal attainment.

Regardless of what we do, we want to improve.  It is the unique overriding value that permeates everything, bar none.  When I speak of living a value-laden life, a rich life, one that is committed to something, it isn't to isolate existence into platonic ideals; it is instead to somehow get at our very specific fragility, our unique situation.  Getting what we want is fine, but it is total end-game.  Winning doesn't matter if our adversary was easy or we didn't earn it.  And I'd go so far as to say that winning doesn't matter at all, when it comes right down to it.