My name is R. Carl Lesher. And no, that’s not what my birth certificate says. Not exactly. I’m 52 years old, which means I’ve accumulated just enough experience to know better but apparently not enough to stop doing things anyway.

I live in Cleveland, Ohio. I’ve spent most of my life there. I’m Gen X through and through. Gen X by birth, of course, but also by temperament, and a seemingly permanent belief that we should take most things less seriously.

For more than 25 years, I was a member of the now-defunct Corporate America. I have a degree in chemical engineering and an MBA, so I guess this means I’m professionally qualified, or was at least at one time professionally qualified, to both understand complicated things and put them into PowerPoint presentations to make them pleasant to look at and considerably harder to understand.

These days, I’m sort of stuck in that grey area of figuring out what comes next.

Freethoughtable is part of this figuring out.

With Freethoughtable, I don’t have a content strategy or a publishing schedule. I gave up on defining a target audience, or even a compelling reason for anyone who makes it here to keep reading. I write because sometimes something gets stuck in my head and won’t leave until I’ve turned it into sentences.

Those sentences often involve things like culture, religion, humanism, getting older, work, science, politics, childhood, technology, and whatever else happens to be irritating, amusing, confusing, or generally fascinating to me at the time. Occasionally I even manage to know what I think about something before I start writing about it.

Mostly, though, this is where I think out loud.

I’m an atheist (I find the mere premise of the existence of a god absurd) and a humanist (but still believe that we shouldn’t be assholes to each other or to our planet). I’m a skeptic by nature, although I’m pretty sure the Catholic church is due some credit for this fact, irreverent by preference, and deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to have it all figured out. And this includes me. Especially me.

I’ve had, by some accounts, a rather interesting life. Some of it wonderful. Some of it spectacularly shitty. I’ve succeeded at a few things, failed at many more, changed my mind about things I once believed absolutely, and survived things I’d rather not have experienced in the first place.

Yet, I’m still here.

Today, I’m increasingly interested in those delightfully messy, cluttered spaces between certainty and doubt, relevance and irrelevance, humor and pain, who we thought we were going to become, and who the hell we actually turned out to be. Still trying to become.

Holy shit! Is that what Freethoughtable is about?

I don’t know. Maybe. Doesn’t matter.

I’ll let you know if I figure it out.