Steven

For three weeks I lived in an abandoned Mazda dealership in Running Springs, Rhode Island, with two original members of ELO, The Electric Light Orchestra. I was raised by a chess-playing IBM computer named Castle who never missed any of my baseball games. When I was 14 I was contacted by Zoa'thellik, the last of the Great Martian Octopusses, while vacationing in Joshua Tree. He spoke Esperanto with a faintly Slavic inflection, knew the names of all my childhood pets, and asked me to increase my consumption of sulfates and await further instructions. He had traveled throughout our solar system and become a devout but non-exclusive Vajrayana Buddhist, he told me, but was encountering difficulty in entering the Earth's atmosphere because of a childhood nitrogen allergy. Once he found a way, he said, he would conquer the Earth and oversee the birth of a new age, in which all creatures would emanate rays of white light and pure love from their fingertips, and Pallushakaru, the Fourth Incomprehensible Divinity, would reappear. Zoa'thellik appointed me Premier of the Moon on my 18th birthday, but I now realize he lacked the authority to award that position, so I rarely wear my aluminum Premier's Cap. Since his cautious approach in late 2006 he has been illegally detained in a holding tank in the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California. The California State Supreme Court ignores my calls and text messages.