All nodes are a work in progress. We would like them to be perfect, flawless snapshots of reality if they are factual nodes; if they are fiction or poetry, we would like them to be equally perfect and flawless text realizations of the idea, the feeling we had in our head that one time.

Unfortunately, we are all flawed and broken people, working with memories distorted by emotion and fatigue and sex and drugs and rock and roll. We are trying to use words to communicate things that happened to other people at other times, times so different from ours that we use different numbers to identify them*. We are trying to communicate with people who don't share our past, who were brought up differently in different places by different parents and therefore have no idea what the hell we are trying to say. They bring their personal histories and biases to our node and walk away, not understanding what we were trying to say at all. Other readers claim to understand, but laugh where we were trying to communicate sadness and fear. Or they cry when we describe something that was supposed to be funny.

Hunter S. Thompson used to quote T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land a lot, to the effect that "Between the Idea and the Reality lies the Shadow". He was mangling the quote, but still, he was on to something, a fundamental truth about communication. We are all working in the Shadow, trying to communicate our Idea and never quite reaching the full truth of Reality. Still, we do the best we can with our imperfect selves and our clumsy words and our poor formatting choices. If we are wise, we keep coming back to our nodes and tweaking them until they are as close to our Idea as we can get them.

All of my nodes are a work in progress. Especially this one.

*Props to Samurai Cat for this moment of Zen.

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