Writing

I can't figure this out, and I've been writing for as long as I've been alive, it seems. Why is it that the emotions that you have while you are writing bear little resemblance, at times, to the emotions you have when you read what you've written?

I'm writing a couple of pieces now for a deadline, and I feel at times like my brain is a wet rag that I'm twisting with all my strength to get a few drops of dirty dishwater from. I'm hitting the word count tab every minute to see how much more I have to do to finish. Then later I read what I have written, and it's decent. At other times, I sit down, and in an hour, I've got more than a thousand words. I read it later, and it's jumbled, disorganized, awkward, lacking in transitions, incomprehensible at times . . . well, maybe not quite that bad, but certainly not like beautiful icing squeezed out on to a cake, which is what it felt like when I was writing it.

Other physical activities have a correlation between ease of action and results. I remember from hitting a softball that if I could establish a rhythm, the flow of the swing and the sequence of muscles (left knee, right hip, hands pull back, wrists cock, unlock, arms drive, hip reverse, weight shifts, bat hits ball: undercut--deep fly; open stance--pull; close stance--right field), the results were what I envisioned. I was never good enough to be consistent, but when everything went right--the body, the muscles, the nerves remember.

And now I have only words to play with.