deepfoam.com

Dedicated to the men and women of our armed forces:

Our world is often a vacuum… and it is equally often not filled by good, fair or equal. This is why the circumstances that allow bad things and evil men to fill their roles also define the heroes who would stop them. Leadership, even in its truest form, can be a lofty place from which to point and cast the sword, yet nothing else can guide the blade. It can leave us with tears in our eyes or a lump in our throat because the odds are as real as the dangers in the hardest things we must do and do for others. That is why our convictions tell us and the world who we are and that our call, whether to duty or to hope, is the reason why we persevere and the reason why we fight; both for that which we have that which we wish to keep. This is why people go, why people rise –not simply because they are told to do so but because they must.

-Jonathan E. Keys (son of retired, Air Force General Ronald E. Keys)

“You know it’s always good to talk and keep in touch with people you care about but that value, hands down, doubles when you can reconnect and realize that they are having to dispense with the same, damn, daily bullshit you do. ”

-J. Keys

It is the creation of humor and the need for those to spread it that truly enlightens us all. I believe that when we can laugh at anything and everything we can not only come together unexpectedly but also dispel the very worst and darkest parts of our greatest ideas and desires to make the world what we think it should be. -JK

Related:  http://massivelatte.com/?p=50

“I am consistently amazed at how people that make it their business to do one certain thing… do that one thing so badly in every respect.”

-J. Keys

The hardship of our past, the fine wine of our lives…
By J. Keys

Today: The hardship of our past always seems so long ago when it was really just around the last bend; just as the challenges in our future and our hopes to make it another year, stronger, are indeed around the next. -JK

Originally Posted on March 15, 2008: “You know I really enjoy going back over so many of these words I’ve written; particularly my creative writing. Yeah, I know, it sounds like I’m tooting my own horn but I’m not. I read these things… these poems, stories and thoughts and they bring me back; not to the past but to who I really am and get so lost from (seemingly more and more). I think this kind of thing defines the fine wine of our lives. Those memories and reminders that always last and continue to call us, making and keeping us… for the better (As “Slide by the Goo Goo Dolls finishes in the background and “Dig” by Incubus begins) -JK

In the spirit of “how great things start” keep in mind that the picture you now own started as nothing. It was blurry, underexposed and noisy. By adding some passion, vision and creativity it became something to the world that it wouldn’t have otherwise. This is how all dreams begin and this how all dreams, one day, become reality.

Your Friend,
Jonathan

It can often be difficult to know, in any tense, a passionate person. Their delight in challenge, both to themselves and others, can easily be misperceived as a threatening or argumentative gesture. But is in knowing others and knowing why that fuels their reasons and their ways. And it is within that passion that they draw out both the wicked and the willing… and are never unclear… about either. -J. Keys

I’ve known Patti for almost 14 year now and although I’ve never known her to be anything less than a razor sharp professional, it is the heart she puts into everything that underlies every single good thing that she is and does. So much of life can be war and I only go to war with those I can rely on and trust. Patti has always been there and I’ve always counted her there. That’s her style and way, all the way. – J. Keys (Me)

It is an almost invisibly thin line between pragmatism and faith, though most either disagree or don’t understand this. A cliche is often uttered that “it takes a thief to catch a thief”…but the truth of the matter is that life, action and survival takes knowing the extreme and opposite of anything to understand it, defeat it or to elevate beyond it. Good, bad, light, dark… sides of the same coin in which the point, divided by an almost invisibly thin line, is so often missed. – J. Keys (Me)

Belief is all important. It is a sense and system employed outside of circumstance and beyond the finite nature of what we think we know and only see in front of us. It allows us to go places and accomplish tasks that our feet and hands cannot. It is a fundamental precept that gives birth to two of the greatest elements of our humanity; faith and hope. Without belief our lives may be filled with many things but those sames lives will never be truly full. -J. Keys

“You know all we have in the end is hindsight. The problem is we never use enough foresight to begin with which is what makes looking back so bad. People start pointing fingers, ‘should have, would have, could have’ done this or that. But the greatest problem isn’t what we should have done or what even went wrong –it’s what we must do next without screwing up all over again.”

-J. Keys

“There’s a simple solution to everything, we just don’t often realize it until we try all the hard, wrong answers first.”

-J. Keys

“Perhaps I am a fool, but at least I’m an honest fool.”

-J. Keys

“Nothing hurts when you win, nothing.”

-J. Keys

“Always go with your first instinct; it’s not that you can never be wrong, you just can’t ever be wronged by it. ”

-J. Keys