"Until it's on paper and it's shit."

If you mean what I think you mean--that everything clicks and angels start singing and your iPod just started playing the BEST FUCKING SONG EVAR in your headphones, but when you try to write it all down it just evaporates and it feels like your pen's ink is made from cardboard--I know that.

I didn't get to go to college, and perhaps as a consequence I fear that I've missed all the important things about what I like to study and write about. There's this class, y'see, where the professor goes "oh by the way, this is the equation you have to memorize, and which is never seen outside these walls, and after that you'll be safe to pontificate about anything without fear of embarrassing criticism." So when I research I put some more personal "oomph" into it to compensate.

When I say I'm fucked, I don't know if it's a problem that needs to be fixed or if it's the way things are. That's the nature of the fucked-ness. I think it might be on the verge of a coping mechanism, and that makes me kick like a mule: Oh-Well-I'm-Screwed-Might-As-Well-Get-On-Social-Security. Urrggg!! shivers Do Not Want.

I've noticed that other people believe they lack an important function--such as socialization, expressing themselves to a lover, treating subordinates as human, taking initiative, whatever--and although it's often kinda right, it's the attention that helps. Most of us are not cast in the molds of fictional stereotypes with immutable "critical flaws," so we can address and repair our problems. So when I say I'm fucked, and then say I don't know exactly how, you're watching someone trying to figure out how. I don't want to believe that this is "just the way things are."

To properly answer the question, I don't think "just the way things are" is anything more than a holiday, but the fix for the problem is going to be personal. You asked how people generate ideas and keep track of them, and it's that second half which, I posit, is most important. It's why I keep trying different things. By accident, I think I've discovered that the persistent act of trying different techniques is what keeps things circulating in my head, and therefore my long term memory.

My "technique" is to keep trying techniques :-)