Jack, Jake and the Lake

He soared with his wings wild and wide, whistling in the wind and wavering above the wintry waters. The frozen hands of Jack had touched the lake below, and with a weary white face it offered up no break from the fall. The span of the once watery surface was acres and acres, and Jake flew for his life. The wind still tried to take him down, to be crushed against the ice, to be blood on snow with broken bones. He shook and looped as clouds covered his view, and his heart cascaded to the depths of his internal reality. He descended like a dart, dropped from the heavens, damned to death by the Gods above.

Down he went, the wind acting like the ice, breaking into his skin and freezing his blood, stopping his organs and grinding them to a fearful halt. They no longer sloshed but crunched, a noise like metal on metal, like mechanical parts striking clunking cogs. The noise deafened him as still he fell, the world spinning, the white icy face coming closer, calamity upon calamity, he knew for certain he was set to die. Though he was entire three dimensional, he felt only like an unreachable ball of fiery emotion headed to the centre of the earth like a burning meteor, which would chomp through the surface as if it were mere cheese.

He blinked. Back in the sky, the wind held him. There was, there had been, no drop; he was flying as sturdily as ever. His gorgeous, glorious unrivalled white wings stayed true, as they had never failed to do. They felt not a part of him, but a part of the sky itself, as though the universe was holding him tightly. Perhaps that meant the universe could decide to drop him, if the wings were not his own, but for now he trusted in them and continued his courageous course. He smiled, for he was but more than emotion, more than fear, and more than a wreck upon the cold and stone like ground. He was more than even he knew, there in the hands of the world itself.

The snowy face of the lake lost that look of bleak weariness; Jake could see the love in its invisible eyes. Jake could see contrast. He could see science and he could see art. He could see death and life, love and hate, pain and happiness. He could see dark and light, fear and courage, anger and soft serenity. He could see it all. Perhaps to see is not to understand, for he understood not why he did not fall. But see he did, and fly he did, for joy, for tears, for the want of never knowing, for the want of never coming within the safety of the ground. 

Grades

And now I stand here, branded for life by letters which do not take into consideration circumstance or personality. This group of letters, collected together after years, will now stand to reflect my intelligence and my work ethic. They show what I can do. They show what I can’t do. They determine my future - they represent me. I will be left with these letters for life.

I feel these letters are like covers to novels. Sometimes, I’m sure they represent exactly what they’re supposed to. You see an A* cover, you open it, and there is the life of an A* student, there in black and white. But also, they can misrepresent. If you open the book, you may find things you never expected to. Behind a D grade student, there may be unspoken hardships you hadn’t anticipated, invisible broken relationships or pain that is unimaginable. There is no way to tell a person’s story with a simple letter. There is no way to pour humanity into a man made symbol, to whittle life down to a mere grade.

There is no other system. It has to be like this – there has to be some regime that evens everything out, ignores the majority of factors, and puts everyone in the same boat so that they are comparable to one another. I understand this, because this system makes up the fundamental backbone of our working society. But it still doesn’t make it any way right. When a kid is born into a working class family with six brothers and sisters and barely enough food to make it through the day gets bullied for five years because of his hand-me-down clothes, and then gets judged by the same letters as a middle class, well-educated only child whose only hardship in life was his iphone’s battery life – IS. THIS. FAIR?

Well, life’s not fair. But it’s not just to do with money and class. It’s to do with unforeseen situations and other factors which cannot be taken into consideration when they make that A or B, or C, or U official to everyone. Life is something we don’t understand – it is complicated beyond belief. We are beating hearts and blinking eyes, whirring brains and chattering teeth, and each of us splashes a path across the globe, interweaving with other paths and situations and events.  Words and memory spiral from this and history is made; emotions play their song. The future envelopes out in front of us….unknown, not understood, but we take steps towards it anyway because there is nothing else to do but trust. And yet, despite all this complicated craziness, this blast of bizarre brains brought together by some big bang, we label our letters. We reduce our lives down to such simplicity, that sometimes I think we miss the entire point of life itself. If there is a point indeed.

Some will think me bitter for writing this - would I be writing this if I'd got the grades I wanted? Perhaps not.  But it is not just for me that I pose this unwinnable argument. It is for all those people who got letters on their pieces of paper who feel they have a different story to one of laziness or stupidity. Whatever life is, it is more than that. 

The red in the river

The river flowed red between the autumn leaves, and no one seemed to want to look upon it. Isaac shifted uneasily with his arms tucked across his chest, and Max and Mark stepped away with their backs to the scene. Whatever had happened upstream, it was definitely not good. Isaac glanced at the others, but they refused to meet his gaze; it seemed this one was on him.

He stepped cautiously over the ground, each step crunching crisp underfoot. The sun was setting at the bottom of the valley, and everything around him seemed to glow gold, red, orange, and brown; he absently thought how beautiful it really was. It shook him to note that the beauty he was commending came from the decay of the nature around him, and soon the trees would be bare, the sky grey and the air a damaging cold. With a heavy heart his eyes swayed to the maroon tinge spiralling through the river to his right. As he walked, its width and colour thickened.

Darkness gathered around him and still he was walking, until in the hazy half light ahead he saw a shape sprawled across the rocks in the centre of the river. Ah, so there it was. He slowed somewhat; after such a build up, after taking one for the team, his reluctance was really starting to kick in. What if it was someone he knew? What if the person who had done it was still around, watching?

As he drew closer, his heart started to rage in his chest; it was definitely the shape of a person. It seemed as though they had been thrown, with their limbs splayed out over the rocks; the blood seemed to be coming from a wound in the head. From what he could see it was a man, wearing what appeared to be a black tuxedo. They were face down, the head almost underwater, so he could not see if he recognised them or not.

He waded in and checked for a pulse, with the attempt being met with a silence that confirmed death. Isaac did not do anything else to the body, but simply waded back out onto the other side, and sat himself down onto the earth. Forensics would kill him for this – there could have been clues, tracks or footprints where he was perching. But for christ’s sake, there was a man dead. He would sit himself down, because he was human and he had a heart. 

A day in the life of the field of a time

She was sitting amongst the long summer grass cross legged and looking at the ground. The day had thrown itself over the edge of the horizon, the sun the forefront of the crusade, rearing its fiery head in anger at the quivering and retreating darkness. She regarded this as if it were merely nothing – this major breakthrough of nature, this occurrence of magnitudinous strength. Her eyes followed the path of the grass tails as they darted to and fro in the breeze, never content it seemed with one position or the other. Millions upon millions of them swayed in the field – if you were 100 metres in any direction, maybe even 50, you would not have been able to see her at all. But there she sat, like a Pixie of nature, but one that had in her countenance an unbearable sadness that led her to be blind to all beauty.

How long had she been there? It seemed like all of eternity. How long would she stay? That was yet to be decided, and only the decider knew that, and herself, of course. She could move, if she wanted, but yet she seemed almost attached to the ground on which she resided, her palms pressed into the grassy, dusty ground. Where had she come from? She was borne out of nature – everyone was, and nature was where she would die. It didn’t matter from which area she came, where she had been, or what she had previously done – she was here, at this very moment, as it was exactly meant to be.

Hours later the clouds sauntered in – they did not roll, it was slower than this, and much less joyful. They were almost as miserable and as dark as herself. They covered the glorious sun momentarily, and this at last dragged her pretty eyes from the ground, causing her to glance up, interested in a change. Finally, some life in this life – even the very grass seemed to dart faster in answer to this decided moment…but then her eyes dropped again, and all was as it was.

Time passed. Time always passes. There is never a time when time does not pass. A rumble sounded in the summery field – thunder? No, this rumble was more subdued…it was her stomach. She was hungry. She was only human, and a need for things other than one’s own thoughts would put an end to any fanciful notion of stepping outside the realms of humanity. But she did not respond to her bodies protest at her stance…she merely stared on, as if watching an army of ants fight the battle of the Roses. Except of course there were no ants. Just her, the grass, and the sun.

Was she really, truly, to stay here to her death? The sun had reached the height of day and it towered proudly above her, probably hindering not helping her defiant situation. She shuffled around and shifted herself forward, so she was half lying on her stomach, her arms supporting her, her back to the sun. Perhaps in hundreds of years time they would find her skeleton in this position, and with a shiver they would feel the sudden overwhelming presence of her emotion and the strain she seemed to be under.

As the sun sulkily started to sink, melting into the darkening horizon like it was almost unwilling to leave her, she sprang up. Her eyes were wide, her hands muddy, her body stiff and her joints robotic. But she shook not from cold, but from what had happened – what had almost begun to happen. Her eyes went wider, her mouth stretched - as if it had not thought of doing this before- and she smiled. The smile pained her muscles, but it was the most beautiful thing the grass had ever seen, and for their dancing tails she would smile a million times. She stretched her arms above her head, and such sudden movement after so long on the ground caused the world to almost falter. It was unexpected, spontaneous and entirely joyous to watch.

She took to running. She ran and ran, silently thanking the world as it beamed back at her motionful body, and the being that had inhibited that field for as long as this story became a spec on the horizon, where it disappeared, her journey yet to go on. 

Wavering in the past, the present, the future and the imagination

What is the planet? What is the world? What is the solar system? What is this life? What are these intakes of breath, billion upon billions of them, every day?  What are the colours? What is the sky? What are the lives and the thoughts and the beating hearts? Who are they beating for – what are they beating for? What is the mind, what is the soul; what is psychological pain? What is sadness when it is heavy like rocks, what is joy when it lifts you to the edge of the universe? What is a journey, what are these words, why am I writing, why are you reading? How does your brain work – isn’t It beautiful? Isn't the way your fingers bend and the way you blink fascinating, the way your toes quiver, the way your insides squirm. The way no knowledge will ever be enough, the way we wonder and wonder. What is my purpose? My goal? My belief? I am intrinsically linked to the point of restlessness with something that I cannot comprehend. I’ve struck a chord in some dimension that no one even knows about. My life is spent wavering in the past, the present, the future and the imagination; spent half in mind and half in action, questioning things more than anyone could know. Thinking of things and feeling hopelessness, because as humans, it’s hard sometimes not to feel hopelessness when we’ve been presented with life, following each other, leading it, accepting it, and not questioning it. It shakes me, like a harrowing storm, to think so deep; ‘tis safer to stay on dry land: “life’s more painless, for the brainless.” But my mind, she has a mind of her own; I am filled with craziness; everything I touch, like skittles, turns to something odd, something strange, something perhaps ruined. Ruined in the eyes of the beholder, blundering my way through life, wondering if ever I will grasp what is to me an understanding. But we, as human, as simple masters of ourselves and yet brainless, stupid, insignificant nothings, created this word “understanding.” We placed letters together; we learned the concept; we shared the concept. But how is it a word, when understanding does not exist? Everything that you know, that you think you know, is not real. Potentially, none of this is real. None but pain, because that is blinding yet enlightening to the point where it can never fail, walking hand in hand with fear and hate to destroy us all. I have faith in humanity, yet I weep for humanity…I fail to “understand” humanity. I fail to understand myself, or what it is that we plan to do, to enjoy, to cry, to weep, to die. To keep on moving forward, ‘til tears have been shed for eternity, babies have been born ‘til the end of time and things have shifted beyond anything we in this snapshot of time, of this thing we call time, could know. Time, time, time, you slip away, you leave us; where do you go? Is there an intergalactic storage centre in the core of nature, of natural comprehension, where the time goes? Does it frolic amongst meadows, does it sing, does it feel emotion? Is it like sand from a sand timer; will we run out of it, before we run out of air? How do you explain things such as time which are real and fundamental but do not truly exist? How to define what it is to spend time, like it is currency, something you can own. No one owns time, time is unownable; time is in itself a Houdini, a terrific performer; an escapist. I’m taking your time, taking it, right now; as if time can be taken, as if time can be told. As if time has been old and young and born and shall die again. Where am I going with this? That’s not the question, for it seems we have no destination; the word destination is just as made up, just as fake, as what it represents. As false as our metaphors, as our similes, of our allusions. A hopeless destination: perhaps I should be filled with utter gloom, perhaps you’re feeling now like I have overstepped the mark; I have questioned too much. But there is no gloom; there is no need for comprehension, or destination. Enjoy the colours, the sky, the emotion, the air, the time, the feelings that shake your soul, the actions that clear your mind, the movements that evoke thought and happiness. Contentment is in those that accept defeat in all understanding and just wonder, and feel joy in something that is entirely out of reach. World - you are truly wonderful. 

Something magnificently beautiful

Words and expression, articulation through a formation of letters, communication through extensive, infinitive vocabulary, is the most beautiful thing the human mind has to offer in this world full of flaws. A moment of true raw emotion, evoked from somewhere within, drawn from something that science cannot explain, written down, scratched out in pen or hastily, shakily typed – that is one of the great wonders of all. The capture of something magnificently beautiful, not necessarily uplifting but perhaps ugly or devastating or disturbing, should never ever be taken for granted. There is nothing greater or more powerful than true human emotion; it is unstoppable and incomprehensible. It shapes, creates and regulates our world and everything we achieve. It is the sole reason we fail, but it is what makes us moral and what makes us alive. It gives us life. To feel emotion is to be on the brink of despair, to be in flight with joy, to be falling with passion, to be sick with overwhelming jealousy. It is to feel burning, feverish rage, to feel unbearable sadness. To feel emotion is to feel and be alive. Love. Love, love, love. It shall break us, only to join us back together again in a new and previously unseen formation. We are not strong enough to understand or contain it; it will always, always control us. What would we do without you, our sweet love? You cause our heart to beat daily for the things we desire; you cause us to make sacrifices that make no logical sense. Love has no rhyme, no reason; it just is as it is. It is raw and it is beautiful, and to express it in words is glorious and apt and true.

What am I, sitting here, giving these words their moment? What do I mean, as this emotion overspills out of my brain and onto this page? I feel we have a connection, these words and I; they know me and I know them. I come to them to make sense and gather meaning, or to unravel my thoughts. They come to me for this raw emotion, which I give to them; for as a human, as we all are human, we cannot deal with it. And this is why I am as crazy as I am. And this is why the world is as it is. This mad, crazy world. 

The elimination of scepticism

I stared up at the temple, white against the black of the sky, arched above my head. There were stars in the air and stars in my eyes as I took a breath, my hands held out in front of me as if in prayer. I felt alone, I didn't quite know what to do. The temple was empty, its large pillars colder than the air, its beauty marred almost by its bleak void of life. I, on the marble steps, breathing in and out, felt isolated from everything. What was I even doing here? My hands shook as the stars wavered through the slats in the stone roof.

Then, out of the darkness, floating as if on a cloud, came a mermaid. Her skin seemed grey and her face was bloodless, like the ghost of a sea woman. Her face was pained, yet there was contentment in her pearly eyes. Her scales glistened like silver in the precious starlight, but her tail flicked impatiently and nervously from side to side, searching for something.

“What do you pray for?” I asked hesitantly, and her eyes seemed to notice me for the first time. My hands were still clasped before my chest, my feet planted on the steps. She floated up and down slightly as she answered.

“To swim,” she murmured simply, before closing her eyes. Then, she sighed and started to fade, 'til all I could see again was black and white and the stars. As doom set in, another figure emerged, and soon I had a man hovering before me. His face was equally as grey as the mermaids, but his eyes were a summer sky blue. His legs were stumps, with ripped trousers revealing smooth scarred skin around the knee bone, where the calf and shin should begin.

“What do you pray for?” I asked, fearing him almost. But his reply was placid; he did not hate the world for what it had done to him.

“To walk,” he nodded, as he too started to fade and leave me, I waited for another figure, and at first I thought perhaps I was truly alone, but then he appeared. This man had black holes for eyes, and my initial instinct was to run. They were darker than anything I had ever seen and seemed to shine out of his pale face, questioning me. Sight, I knew he prayed for sight, and that I could not give him. My throat and tongue dried in my mouth as I shook, ready to cry, unable to ask. But he spoke to me.

“Not sight. I do not pray for sight. I only pray to have had the ability to see, so that when I sense the world, I can imagine it as it is. I only wish for visual knowledge and memory.” He bowed his head, the holes gaping hopelessly at the floor.

My heart thudded as he faded, and my hands left their pose of prayer to reach up and trace the rims of my own eyes. I wished, crazy as it was, that he could borrow them to see the world. But maybe, perhaps, he was better off believing its brilliance, than forever brooding on the darkness and the stars. I stared down at my own feet then, the feet made for this world, the feet able to take steps and run. As if on que they jolted forward, carrying me up into the temple, 'til I was standing in the middle, my eyes wide. Everything was as it should be. My body held no ailments, no cuts, no bruises, and no breaks. I had scope to dream, scope to live, scope to achieve. Yet, I was praying. What for? What was it that I required?

All of a sudden I felt alone again. There was no helping this. It was as swift as a dagger to the heart, that sadness. It struck when you were wavering like the stars. Then, the figure of myself floated down from the darkness. It looked grim and tired, weary from wanting. But I could not guess what it would say, so I asked; I had to ask.

“What do you pray for?”

It's eyes opened – my eyes opened. They were silent for a second to the point where I thought perhaps I would not receive an answer. But then, the mirrored me spoke, and I felt a sense of gratitude for this strange night and my own mental madness.

“The elimination of scepticism,” the figure said. “Hope. I pray for hope.”

Indescribable

Just for a moment, I felt tremendous hope, and I saw all the beauty in the world that surrounded me.
 I saw it, how wonderful it all was, as the setting sun stretched across the landscape, the trees shining in the light. The leaves as they trembled in the quiet breeze, the grass with all it's beautiful shades of green, growing long against the shackles of humanity. I see the spring as it splashes with such vigorous yet gentle dexterity, carving it's way through the landscape, searching for something that perhaps it will contentedly never find. The end of the day throws fantastic fiery colours
across the vast sky, the edges tainted by the coming of dusk, but yet everything is bathed in this beautiful light still, and there is an indescribable glory in it, a joy that can't be put into words. Yet I try- because that is what we do with our words.We try to express what was truly felt, and I felt calm and peaceful, yet ignited and excited by the serenity and perfection yet diversity of the nature that I was breathing and living in. I ran like a madman down the lane, my feet pounding the dirt, the cold
air stinging my cheeks. I smiled and I smiled at the landscape, and the sunset smiled back at me. Someone, something, gave us this world. And its at moments like this that it has to be appreciated. There may be hate, death, scandal, sadness, grief. But there is love and there is beauty and sometimes we just need to take a moment to take it all in, to feel it, to know it, to appreciate it. I saw the trees
and I thought how misunderstood they are; they may be silent as lambs but they've seen way past our years, and they grow towards the clouds for what to us seems like eternity, seeing it all, adding layers to their soft brown skins, tough to our human imperfections, watchful of our failures and our cute
successes. They give us their fruit, like gifts dropping from above, and we take it. And we live. But here I stood, in this field, feeling the world, loving things, just loving things, not expecting anyone to understand me. And I write this knowing that to read it will pronounce me crazy, but
I know, and so do the birds as they sing, and the sheep as they float in the fields made by man, what it is to be here and to be alive and to want to be alive. Nature overflows here, it's not controlled, but loops over its boundaries, ready to be discovered. I waited and waited, breathing and watching, until
the sun finally set, and the landscape was coloured with grey. But this was okay, because I knew that the colours would come again, it was okay that they were not there. I ran and ran and ran back to the house for safety, high on my adventure and the weirdness of my brain, happy with my mad moment with nature. I'm mad enough to be a writer, I thought. I'm crazy enough for this. I need to write this down, because that is what I do: so here I give this snippet through my telescope to you.

Stupid Things

Stupid things that don't matter twist emotions...twist them like steel hands around a candle, moulding it into waxy mush, with concaving finger indents. Strange things pull your heart down, 'til there's that slight lump in your throat and your limbs are heavy and your head is tired. Weird occurrences you should not care about but they throw your thoughts into turmoil, leaving you grieving what-could-have-been moments, crying over unreal ideals, smiling over forgotten loves.

The most bizarre of all is that when the real things go wrong, you notice. The world falls in, like a castle of cards, tumbling down to the table top, leaving you crushed by their papery bodies. There's a longing and a sense of guilt for ever feeling so bad when things were right, because now things are really wrong: properly wrong. You beg to return to a time when the strange things pulled your heart down, so you can be free to pull it back up, without cards catapulting through the air, and tears flying like daggers from your face.

But, its no use. The stupid things make up my mind and make me tick over, like an impatient clock. And waiting for things to fix themselves while I stand perfectly intact with muscles bulging and breath clear as daylight, is ludicrous. Emotions may be superficial, but the world itself is superficial. The stupid things will break us, like the trojan horse, or Achilles heel. Emotions take our immortality; they are our vulnerability. But this is what makes us human; this is what makes us alive. Without these strange things, to make us happy as if we're birds in flight, and sad like stones in the ocean, what would life be?

Unreachable

Our society is proudly marching in the complete wrong direction in a multitude of ways, and everyone is too busy playing on their smart phones to notice. I look around so often and ask, why is everything just so fucked up? There are so many things about our modern culture that just don't make any sense at all, but we all just go along with it, because who is the individual to question the majority? We judge, bully, reject and kill, we torture and starve, rape and neglect. Addicted to unreachable perfection, falling short every time because nothing is realistic or accepted. Everything is prejudged and judged. We crave brands to be accepted and we lie to be loved. We lie to ourselves, even though we know that everyone else is lying as well. The world is just full of lies, in marketing education, and politics. Boys are allowed to waltz around and treat girls like they're worthless, and most of our music is just misogynistic bullshit that we eagerly lap up because it has a nice beat and of course, because everyone else is doing it.  

Did you waltz into the fire?

The day has ended, we are into the night; the strands of daylight whisked away and replaced by an unseeable black, which covers all in bright darkness. What have you achieved? How have you used your hours awake? Did you smell the breath of the sea as you dived off a cliff into the swirling ocean? Did you ride a muscular horse bareback as he galloped roughly through the desert, clinging to his mane? Did you understand someone and see who they really are; did you glance inside their soul and view the true definition of your complicated relationship? Or did you fall madly in love with someone whom you should for everything it's worth despise, but their beautiful eyes just got you and you felt some crazy urge to kiss them? Did you learn a true and unyielding fact that blew your brain into helpless smithereens, and left you begging for life to make sense again? Did you break a promise, walk away from a commitment, or make a devastating change? Did you steal someone's glory, did you bask in some form of shame, did you walk a tight tight rope across someone's conscience? Did you make some small correction, or alter some small fear; did you make some small objection or did you waltz into a fire? Did you use this day, this God given day and the life you have been blessed with? Or did this day, like the others, get snatched away by your immediate and dominant pleasures, as you watched things pass you by, miserably moping on account of nothing happening? Use the day and your humanity as you take the air from this planet like gold from a piggy bank; make all the pain worthwhile, because this calm and pleasant contentment and this glorious beautiful world is there for you, when you're ready for it. Make the next day and the next the ones that count.   

Nothing but sky

The sky is dark blue, like a summer crystal with a shade of night exploding in the dark dust above him. He's on a cliff, which throws him into the air above the ground below, until all the trees look like broccoli and the men like action figures from a children's toy set. It's winter, so with this summer sky with it's purple and fiery blue colours comes his breath, pale as death into the air, like the smoke from a dragon's throat as he coughs and sneezes with a seasonal cold. He stands there, taking all of this in, rubbing his white and pink hands together, contemplating what it all means.

Here, there is nothing but sky, it outstretches over everything, cuddling the corners of that tiny earth. And here he is, standing in it, breathing into it, giving it life as it floats around him like bubbles from a boiling bath; one that would wrinkle your skin and warm you to the bone. The broccoli sways below in the strong wind that soars through the earth and the little plastic men totter from place to place with these realistic aims and ideas. Look at them go, look at them live! He cannot see their smiles, he is too far away, but he knows they are there. Protruding from their ageing faces, like shining beacons of hope.

He should go and join them, he is one of them. But yet, he is not. There is no shining beacon of hope splashed across his face from summer rain; only hard crystal eyes sent from the fire of winter, sent with what he's seen and what he understands. He stretched out his cold hands and closed those eyes, and the lights went out in the world. Everyone, everything, was still. Time seemed to pause, holding it's breath, waiting, as this one man stood and contemplated everything and nothing, the end and the beginning, life and death, happiness and distress.

Tears that seemed black in this bright night dropped like tiny silver bullets onto the dark grass below him, and he watched them as they soaked like daggers into the brown ground. The figures were tottering again, though the trees still seemed frozen and waiting. He lowered his hands and clenched his teeth, the wind blowing his jacket, gnawing at his chest. What were they waiting for? Nothing. They could do without him.

And then with a bang and a crack and a blinding flash which fired up like morning and then burned out like dusk, he was gone. There was a sizzling black singed mark where he had been standing, and the birds in the nearest tree gaped with their beaks open in wonder. One moment he was there, the next he was gone. The men, the women, they tottered. The trees, they bent and swayed. The wind howled as the night wore on, but the man was gone. He just didn't hope to understand. It was beyond everything he knew.