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“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

My Friend,

Yes, all good things in time –I know.  I’m not running off or away… but just changing the nature of many things that have needed change for a while.  All things happen for a reason; all events that occur do not occur out of time and therefore they affect each moment and person that they touch.  To ignore that or not examine it is to deny the need to grow in every thing we do and that affects us.

This experience, though nauseating, is bringing me ideas, thoughts and questions that I either didn’t ask or chose not to address.  This is a good thing because I think I’ve shied away from a number of things I need to be better at, stronger at and that will get me to the point in my heart and soul that I can not only be great as an individual but also be great for others I share my life with.

None of this is me complaining or whining.  No “boo-hoo, perfect harmony eludes me”   I have many times said that conflict is a milestone of civilization despite the various grotesqueries it can entail; and so it is true as well for our souls and spiritual growth.

Externally this has brought about a much more acute vision, for me, in a manner of high specificity for those people that are indeed “good”.  Even though the mass moves, mostly, amenably to one another there are only a handful that have “the right stuff” You are, without question, one of those few.  This is just as important as any other realization because as my life moves on (as all of our lives move on) we’ll be able to go beyond any one place –perhaps even together and in parallel.

That, to me, is the diamond in the rough of life. Because change will come and it will not be stopped.  No person or place is safe from it –not one.  The trick in making it through is in going with it and not trying to escape it.  The bulk of my life has been built on a blessed foundation of such a thing.  Living with that concept is what taught me to adapt, fight and soar where others wouldn’t for fear of the ground not being there when they returned… and the difference that always separated me from them, in the end, wasn’t that I knew they were wrong or pointlessly full of fear… but that I simply never planned on coming back down to the ground again, myself.

This is not a legend to become but a legacy in its infancy…

Sincerely,
Caleb

I know, I know… to write something title of this nature and feel, as it were, “blessed”?  Clarity is a peculiar thing; so often wanted but equally often uninvited… and then so welcomed when it arrives.  We are strange creatures.

For anyone reading I would say either don’t worry and/or don’t take too much credit.  This isn’t just about shitty people that are obvious scumbags.  They are easy to dispatch and keep at bay.  No, when I herald the phrase, “people are trash”, I speak of those very special ones that make fools of us… those that bring out our hopes, dreams and trust and then… well… obviously.

I didn’t come up with the phrase or the inherent truth that it exposes.  It was another; one of my two best friends in this world.  Ironically this is not the only truth he helped me discover as I found my true reason for believing in God because of him as well though this particular truth I write about?  I didn’t quite get it until getting kicked in the teeth three times (almost in a row) by three people that pretty much got the best of me and took a big, steaming dump all over my heart and soul so that they could, more or less, save themselves… of, I don’t know, the trouble, the angst or maybe just the fact that fighting for anything that matters that much was just too damn hard for them.

But perhaps I digress slightly as my plight is my own whereas this larger mechanism is far more dangerous than anything insidious because it really isn’t about bad people doing bad things… it’s about good people doing bad things.  This failure secedes negotiation, forethought and the atlas hold required to bear the weight of heavy things like love, anger and passion… this very failure is the reason why people become this way, act this way and come to honestly believe that what they are doing is “for the best” when it is really, simply “in their best interest”.

The struggle, survival and our power to choose is not the test of life itself; it is the gift.  It is not the hope in each other or our ability in faith that fails; it is we who fail because we choose poorly… or worse we simply choose selfishly.

I imagine this is not over and though what I say is not untrue… it is also not definite.  Nevertheless I’m certain this is not the last time we’ll meet but I do hope and hope that I will be blessed to know better the difference, glance and smile perhaps, and let you (all of you) be on your way…

That is all.

“Truthfully, you never really know until you turn that corner.”

-J. Keys

A personal, journal entry first written on 10-17-2007 -Ed

Perhaps a terrible place to begin is as good as any; maybe even the best. As low as I feel I get the faintest sense that everything indeed feels just like it should. I don’t know if that makes me a martyr, pathetic or just in the right place at the right time despite the positive vs. negative nature of how things have unfolded.

There is an essence of relief, somewhat. Getting things out and out in the open. Perhaps the first step to having everything you want and need begins when there’s nothing hidden left… nowhere else to hide.

I knew it would end the way that it did… but I didn’t believe that it would. Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned there. That what we know is really just a supposition based on a probably outcome and that what we believe is our only way, our only chance to affect that probability. Since it appears that our ability to know is finitie but our ability to hope, to believe is infinite.

Sincerely,
J. Keys

Lec,

Attached is a photograph from the night we all went to Agatha’s for the dinner theater; this version is rendered with some specific lighting and brush stroke filters. The original was almost unusable due to the shutter speed I used at the time and was filled with tons of “image noise” and blur making it also pretty much unprintable and un-presentable. Even with digital photography nothing is perfect.

But instead of throwing it away or trying to fix an unfixable thing, I made it into something else. By color saturating the canvas and blurring the lines the viewer’s attention can be brought back to the original serenity that was intended to be captured in the first place. Many of my best creative works have come about in this manner –a realization I continue to find quite inspiring when something broken and commonly to be discarded can become something else entirely.

Enjoy the picture.

V/R
J. Keys

In the End
By J. Keys

The rain poured down like that from a waterfall -crashing and relentless. Caleb watched from a distance in the cold, blue afternoon standing amongst the trees, away… within a hazy smokescreen-like fog camouflaged beside the other graves within the cemetery.

He just stood there. Watching them all pour over the casket… like the rain. He saw them all there and in a morbid fashion he could see everything for the first time, in real time as they cried and lowered their heads at the tragedy that appeared before them.

He just stood and watched. His breath condensed against the cold and wet atmosphere, taking the consuming shape of sharp and painful things… like the claws of a dragon and teeth of a tiger flushing past his face and rising through the falling rain like an angel.

And then she approached the tomb, not sad, but dead with sorrow of what she saw but really only what she thought she knew. She stood above the box becoming engulfed by the storm… drenched as she looked upon the chasm. Then she reluctantly cast down a single rose and as it landed thunder rang out like the sound of titans at war. Everyone shuddered and everyone shrieked… everyone but her. And slowly one tear from her eye trickled down her cheek standing out from the billions of rain drops crashing from the sky.

Then Caleb did what he would never do for anyone else. He reached to his head, grasped his felt fedora hat in his right hand, clinching it, and brought it to his side. The rain took its place upon his body, upon his shoulders.

Before she turned away for good she looked aimlessly… perhaps randomly… perhaps fatefully upon the trees in the distance… seeing only the faint appearance of a shadow fading into the mist and rain… and for a moment her hope sparked… but then faltered in despair of the impossibility.

( cue track: Linkin Park – In the end [instrumental only] )

But somewhere inside she didn’t give up and she looked up far into the overcast sky through the sharp vein of trees and branches scattered about like rusted prison bars… and as Caleb looked on somehow he knew this too and faded finally away into the fog.

He licked his lips of life and placed his hat back upon his head, sighing with relief and sorrow… and a little bit of hope. He stuffed his hands in his coat pockets and cinched the gap closed as he scaled the leaf-covered yard of stone. And he walked knowing; knowing that in the end the return of all things is a force of fate that always makes its way back and can never be denied…

(…fade out…)

…To Be Continued…

“One of the most important lessons in life can be learned from the process of building computers; if you have to exert an inordinate or incredible amount of force to make something fit or work it’s probably wrong or it will break.” -J. Keys

In Summary
By J. Keys

I would like to not be misunderstood when I am gone. That if I am to suddenly leave this place and remain many things unfinished that they not be… misperceived.

I say this, here and now, with no certain death before me but how do any of us know what that is or when it will truly be? We don’t… but I often hear people talk of others after they pass… and I wonder about their recollections as much as their interpretation of anything that might be left behind.

I have written and said many things. Others in life have done this too and so often I hear scholars and know-it-alls speak of these works and pretend that they know every word and intention. They find articles abound and make ghastly and potentially ignorant assumptions largely based on conventions or hard lines of conduct that even these interpreters don’t follow but participate in and all but lie about.

So I say to you in this mini-bibliography that may one day don a book jacket but should certainly precede any eulogy for me as much as the carving on my tombstone: Take no one thing and make it me. My words and my ways color my life from start to finish. They define me not in one page, letter, time or emotion. I have sinned in this life and I have risen above that sin as well. I have loved and I have hated, I have been a good friend and a selfish man. But I am not one line nor an undiscovered vice. My passion and my gifts are what they are, remember and rejoice in them but never pretend you fully know how… or reasons why. That is mine and not for you to see, so take no one thing and ever make it me.

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