What, in your mind, distinguishes 'There is a reality' from 'The sentence "there is a reality" is true"?

'There is a reality' is the closest I can get to expressing the physical truth. It's still a failure. It's a map, not the territory, but it's the closest I can get to the territory. 'The sentence "there is a reality" is true' is more like a map of a map. It's clearly supposed to be a map. It's an obvious attempt at a logical truth.

Put another way, if I draw a picture of a pipe, and it's not convenient to actually give you a pipe, I probably mean a pipe. If I draw a picture of a picture of a pipe, I couldn't have been referring to anything but a picture.

When I say reality is true, I mean it's there. "There is reality" is only there in the sense that you wrote it. If I wrote "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", (which I did), it would be there.

It appears you want more out of 'general law' than 'applies in every case'. I use it as a tool. All I want for that is for it to generally work. For it to be real, 'applies in every case' is neither sufficient, nor necessary. It has to actually exist. This keyboard I'm typing on is real. Can you give me a single case in which it applies?