My name is Charles. I'm very lucky.

I was born in hell.

We didn't call it that, of course. The thing about hell is that when it is all you know, then you don't realize that it's hell. It's just the way things are.

It was a very big city in the middle of a big continent. And it was chaos.

The city's government was corrupt to the core: a true political machine. The city itself was filthy. Litter everywhere. The waterfront had rats the size of small dogs.

The cops were incredibly dangerous and brutal. My father was maced just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

My uncle was beaten and hospitalized for trying to do his job: he was a reporter for a national magazine trying to cover a major protest. His cameraman got it even worse.

As the guy with the big clock said, 911 is a joke.

At one point my father and I marched for civil rights with the preëminent civil rights leader of the time. People threw bricks.

Gangs roamed my neighborhood, as did bullies. More than once I was chased, threatened, or beaten.

When I was maybe five some kid threatened to stab me in the throat with a giant icicle. I think I peed my pants.

Another time two bigger kids caught me and threatened to stick me in an incinerator until I screamed so loudly that they let me go and ran away, laughing as they went.

I'm not complaining; just explaining. My siblings had it even worse.

I remember my childhood in the city as vague fear punctuated by regular episodes of utter terror, but also as adventure. If I think back, I can still feel that paralyzing fear — that inability to move my legs and the feeling of utter dread as the monsters closed in on me. Occasionally, I still dream about it.

I was lucky, however, in that my parents were the best kind of parents. Until I was maybe eight. Then things went right to shit.

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To avoid upsetting folks who might read this — some of whom were there — I'm not going to go into detail, but it is a tale of various abandonments, struggles, gaslighting, breakdowns (and institutionalizations, although not me, thankfully), poverty, and death.

But the funny thing is that when that's all you know (and you're a kid), you just go with it.

Many years later — in my mid-thirties — I took advantage of some free therapy just to see what it was all about. My therapist asked me whether I had a happy childhood, and I said, honestly, yes.

Then she asked me to narrate it, which I did. When I finished she looked at me with astonishment.

Why did you say you'd had a happy childhood? Did you listen to yourself? she asked. That was one of the worse childhoods I've heard told.

And when I thought about the story I'd just told her, I realized that she was right. I'd said that I was happy, and then my highlights reel was nothing but crushing pain, sadness, and despair: first this terrible thing happened, then that one, then this other thing...

That is because it was the highlights reel: I'd touched only on the big events, which were mostly bad. But there were plenty of fun moments, too. Just smaller ones.

That's when I realized that we humans simply adapt, or at least I do, and whatever we experience becomes the norm.

But also, I remembered that I had been reasonably happy — most of the time — which made me realize that happiness comes from within. Happy people find ways to be happy; unhappy people cannot be made happy.

I dealt with the bad things as they came along, and learned to work around them. And there was always a way around them.

Heh. That early epiphany made me pretty happy.

So as I say, I have been very lucky.

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But I was doubly lucky because I was always able to think for myself. I can't explain it. Maybe I lack the mimetic gene. But I always, without fail, went my own way.

Perhaps the earliest example of this had to do with religion. My parents were ardent Catholics — my father especially.

We didn't do Santa Claus. We did our stockings on St. Nicholas Day — December 6 — and we called Santa, St. Nick.

We had a manger scene in the living room, and on Christmas day we would take little statues of the Magi and would start them in the kitchen and move them a bit each day until they arrived at the manger on Three Kings Day, January 6.

The best part is we got gifts on all three days!

We did Lent, and Easter, and all the other Catholic holidays and sacraments, and we went to mass — in Latin — at least twice per week. And Sunday School, of course. My mother liked to remind me that I was born on Good Friday.

Many of our childrens' books were the stories of the Bible, especially Genesis. Noah and the ark was a favorite.

When I was maybe five or six I approached my mother and said to her, All this God stuff... that's all pretend, right?

She started to dissemble a bit, but I insisted that it made no sense at all unless it was just a story. I told her that I didn't believe any of it, especially that ark nonsense. Two of every animal? Come on!

My father was angry, but my mother stood up for me. And so while the rest of the family went to church, I was left on the playground to play.

Boy, those were the days! No one today would leave a five-year-old alone on a playground for two hours in the heart of a dangerous city (or anywhere else, I bet). Not these days. You'd get arrested.

Within a year my mother announced that she'd thought about it, and that she didn't believe the Bible either. It just didn't make sense to her.

My father fought it, but in the end, he surrendered, too. He left the church, and for the rest of his life he called himself a pantheist.

Was this my doing? And did it trigger the shitstorm that soon followed? Who knows?

But I made up my own mind and I stuck to it no matter how strong the pressure to conform. And that has been true as long as I can remember.

No one has ever been able to make me do anything.

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The other bit of luck I had was to be born both very bright — typically the smartest kid in my school — and very curious. With astonishing attention to detail.

When I was in the equivalent of kindergarten (I went to Montessori school), my teacher pointed out to my parents how my drawings were different from those of all the other students.

When the other kids drew a tree, they drew the trunk and then a big blob of green representing the foliage.

I drew each individual branch and leaf. They'd never seen anything like it. I drew all the scales on my fish and all the feathers on my birds.

So there is something different about me. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm pretty happy with it. It has made me quite resliient, and able to go my own way.

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It was at a pretty early age — possibly even single digits, but definitely before puberty — that I realized that adults were mostly full of shit.

I also noticed that they liked to condescend a lot, especially to children. And they got very angry when you pointed out their bullshit.

On more than one occasion my grandmother slapped me while yelling, Don't be precocious! I was in my late twenties before I discovered that precocious was actually not a derogatory word.

In short: astute and honest observations not welcome here. Not that that stopped me.

The other big mistake my family made was to tell me, after my parents split up, that I was now the man of the family and had to look out for my mother. Why the fuck would you say that to an eight-year-old boy? What chance did I have of acting on that?

And so when my mother died in a car accident a few years later — I was thirteen — I internalized my failure to be a man. Yeah. Took a decade or so to work through that one.

But the other aspect of this is that from nine years old on, there really wasn't an authority figure in my life. And so I became my own authority.

That could have turned out very badly, and for most people it probably would have. But those first seven healthy years stood me in good stead. I had a good moral code, reasonably solid self-esteem, and strong personal integrity.

I did plenty of stupid shit, but I didn't do anything to hurt anyone — not intentionally anyway — and I was careful to avoid real trouble.

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By twelve years old, I had a job and was making more money than my mother. I was big for my age and smarter than everyone else, so all my friends were older than I was. One was a high-school teacher in his thirties. Really.

I quickly grokked that I could do as I pleased. I stayed out all night. I went to 24-hour cafés at 3 AM with my friends and shot the shit. We all worked at a miniature golf course and we'd have 2 AM barbecues and play backwards golf.

When the carnival came to town, I treated all my friends because I was the only one who had any money.

I was living the life.

When my mother died and we were sent to live with my father, he tried to put that genie back in the bottle, but I was having none of it. I was careful to give the impression that I was obedient, but when he wasn't looking, I did whatever I wanted to do.

That included — because again I looked older than I was and all my friends were old enough to drink — carousing the strip joints until the wee hours of the morning after sneaking out my bedroom window. I was fifteen years old.

But unlike my brothers and most other people I know, I never got caught. I was smart and careful, avoiding stupid behaviors that would get us arrested, for example. Which also helped to keep my friends out of jail.

The great benefit of this to me, perhaps even enough to outweigh the downside of the missing authority figure, was that I developed an unshakeable self-confidence. There was nothing I couldn't handle, so I was willing to try everything.

My father once said that he worried about me because I was utterly fearless. That wasn't really true, but it wasn't that far off, either.

I had faced the terrors of my early childhood and discovered that there wasn't really anything left to fear.

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Because the adults around me were so full of shit, I was forced to start from scratch. So I threw out most of what I'd been told, and tried to build my own philosophy of life.

It's not that I didn't listen to people or consider their points of view. I did. But then I made my own decisions.

Of course, most of what we know we absorb unconsciously from those around us, so despite my blank slate approach, my first efforts didn't turn out much different than those of everyone else.

But, to my credit, I hope, I kept digging deeper and asking harder questions. Why did I believe this? Why did I reject that?

Eventually, it occurred to me — and this while I was still in high school — that all our beliefs rest on some fundamental assumptions that we take for granted. We can't prove them, so we are forced to assume them.

They are completely arbitrary. But one has to start somewhere.

Of course, most people never think about this at all. They just take what they've been handed, assume that it must be true — and, naturally, that everyone else in the world who sees things differently is wrong — and then they get on with it.

I decided to choose my own axioms.

I knew, even as I was choosing them, that I was preferring some axioms over others because of my personality — my innate character — and others because of nurture — the way I'd been raised.

But that's OK. It doesn't really matter which axioms we choose. There is no more basis for one axiom than for any other, no matter how much we hate to admit that. That's why they are axioms.

What's important is to choose them consciously and deliberately. With intent.

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For nearly half a century now I've been asking questions, experimenting, and thinking: refining my model of the world daily.

I estimate that I've devoted study to this effort equivalent to three or four times what is required to get a Ph.D. But because I didn't bother to get a credential, this counts for nothing with most people.

Most of us have decided who we are by the age of twenty-five, and we change very little after that.

We read the same books (if we read at all), eat the same dishes, choose friends just like our other friends, do the same jobs, watch the same movies and television shows, listen to the same music, live with the same tribe.

We are static.

In my view, the zombie apocalypse has already happened. Most of us are zombies and have been since we died — at around age twenty-five. After all, the primary characteristic of life is change. Stasis is death.

If you have stopped learning, growing, evolving, then you are the walking dead. In short: a zombie.

In contrast, I have spent my entire life changing. Changing what I think, what I believe, what I do, what I eat and drink, what I read or watch, and how I live.

I am almost unbeatable in an argument, which greatly annoys my friends and family. But my secret is simple: if you beat my argument, then I adopt yours. Why would I cling to the wrong model?

Do that for a few decades and see how potent your arguments get. And I've been practicing them all that time.

The people I know who died at around twenty-five get quite angry about this. They say that I'm a hypocrite for changing my views. But they are fools.

Hypocrisy would be if I knew that your argument was correct, but kept promoting my own. Hypocrisy is when our beliefs and our behaviors conflict. If I adopt your beliefs — because they are better — then my beliefs and my behaviors remain in line.

I don't owe it to anyone to maintain a specific set of beliefs. I can believe anything I want to believe.

Where, then, the hypocrisy? What I've done is to evolve. And that's what most people refuse to do.

The only thing that has remained consistent through these many decades is my set of fundamental axioms: my core beliefs. And that's as it should be.

As I'll discuss elsewhere, there is a nearly infinite number of possible models of reality, all of them equally valid. Add, subtract, or change even one axiom, and the model may change dramatically.

But I have no time to explore a thousand models, or even a few. So I chose the axioms that resonated most profoundly with me, and the models I have constructed — and continue to tinker with — have evolved directly from them.

I'm pretty happy with progress so far.

This site is an effort to explain these models out loud, as it were, to see if they really do hold together.

And to explain them (and much more) to my beloved Hannah, so that she may take from them what works for her in her model, and may continue to learn from these epistles long after I'm gone.

Who knows? Maybe there is something here for you, too, dear reader.

In the end, what I learned is that the antidote to fear is love. Did I mention that I'm very lucky?