In other words, at some point his focus shifted to the bottom line. A ball pinned to the plexiglass after a full-court sprint at 4.3-40 speed is indeed spectacular and oftentimes brings the spectating assemblage that’s paid pretty good money for the chance to witness such kinesthetic stunt-pilotry roaring to its collective feet, but when swatted from the unsuspecting opponent’s fingertips in the second period, say, doesn’t necessarily matter much in the ambitus of victory or defeat.

I’m a bit fuzzy on the demographics of Wag’s Revue’s readership, but in my experience a healthy audience-majority for the writing that finds its way into small-circulation literary journals tend themselves to be writers at various stages of progress in terms of patching together literary careers; and if your typical morning routine kicks off with coffee and the day’s first cigarette and multiple one-or-two-sentence missives from editors declining to bring out your work in magazines or journals that you don’t even recall submitting to and if you’d even heard of them prior to sending the product of your best creative effort off to be adjudged worthy of admittance or not by the keepers of decreasingly prestigious gates—i.e., submitting to these unknown masthead figures’ inscrutable and perhaps unsound aesthetic whims—then certainly hadn’t ever read, waiting for you (the form-rejections) in your box between polite reminders of loan-payment due-dates and eclectic bouquets of those unsolicited e-missives popularly known as “spam,” then a lot of this alleged reading of ostensibly literary stuff is less like the reading you maybe remember doing however many years ago, the almost supernal pleasure of which was when you thought back on it one of the reasons you decided that it might be cool, someday, to write than a mercilessly masochistic infliction of ongoing-failure-driven and personal-limit-gripping pain.

If you’re the sort of reader, that is, given to experiencing varying degrees of jealousy and rage and basically feeling that I’m better than this prick, what’s he doing in this journal; how come he isn’t reading me, I’m going to risk presumption here and just guess that you’re not going to read the following revelation and be flooded with an empathic fellow-feeling with this author’s plight when he at last dispenses with ancillary ditherings about the professional athlete and turns to fraught discussion of his own coming-to-terms with what it really means, as a writer to win or lose, to fail or to succeed.