When I was 5 years old I wrote a computer operating system in 8086 assembler. My family was too poor to own a computer so I wrote it in pencil on index cards using an Intel chip reference given to me by a kindly old gentleman at our church. Thinking that I could sell the operating system and use the money to get my family out of our one room, dirt floor shack, I contacted Bill Gates and showed him my work. He stole it, laughing, and saying no one would believe that DOS had been written by a five year old boy. It turns out he was right.
Crushed and still impoverished, I turned to early twentieth century idealists for comfort. I devoured the works of Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Mikhail Bakunin, among others, barricading myself in one corner of our one room shack for days with nothing but a crust of bread, a glass of dirty water, and my precious books on anarchism. By the age of seven, my initial anarchist tendencies had given way to socialism, and I became politically active among various Marxist and Trotskyist groups, although I retained a certain basic anarchical distrust of highly structured organizations and often found my more democratic tendencies at odds with those who favored a strong revolutionary state. Despite these differences of opinion, I found myself traveling the world, organizing workers in various first and third world countries, and working to disrupt the global hegemony of transnational corporations, especially of Microsoft, the company owned by my arch nemesis, Bill Gates, built largely from revenue from the operating system I had written.
It was during these travels, while visiting family in Italy, and also attending a conference on the Soviet Union, that I met the first true love of my life. Her name was Francesca Ricucci and she was an older woman--10 years old--while I was still only 8. I can still remember the joy I felt when, while reading Gramsci's "Lettere dal Carcere" together by candle light, we vowed to spend the rest of our lives together fighting capitalism. We dreamed of one day raising our children in a post-capitalist utopia that we would craft with our own hands.
Fate was to deal me another cruel blow later that year. My dear Francesca, on a mission to educate farmworkers in Pinochet's Chile, was taken from the world by the bullet of a CIA assassin. I vowed to avenge her death by bringing down the president of the United States at the time, Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately, the imbalanced individual I got to assassinate the president was not a particularly good shot, and he managed to not hit a single vital organ of the president. Information I uncovered and then leaked to the American public several years later about secret arms for hostages deals with Iran and illegal backing of contras in Nicaragua still failed to topple the administration, and I found myself discouraged to the point of despondency and I no longer found any joy or purpose in my political activities.
It was around this time that a friend gave me an old violin and I began to take lessons from an old family friend, Giovanni Cataldo. Much to the surprise of everyone, including myself, I took to playing music almost immediately and quickly developed a deep and abiding love of music. When I was twelve I composed my first opera in Italian, named for and about the life and death of my true love, Francesca. Although it was not as successful as I had hoped, it did well enough for me to win financing for a series of operas, collectively entitled, "La Lotta", about the collective struggle of oppressed peoples against the capitalist class. These operas, of course, were a flop. In retrospect they were much too overtly political and their atonal composition did not have broad appeal.
Disappointed by the cold reception of "La Lotta" by the opera community, I once again fell into a deep depression and this time turned to drugs. By the time I was 14 I was a full blown heroin addict. After this my memory starts to get really fuzzy. I believe it was around this time that I started calling myself Captain Saturn. The only vivid memories I do have, all seem to involve a giant Marxist crime fighting chicken named Superpollo, with whom I became engaged once again in the struggle against capitalism. There are those who say that I actually wrote all of the songs for the album "Kick" by the Australian pop group INXS. If this is true, I have no recollection of having done so. I am not credited in the album. Although it certainly explains how I was able to buy so many drugs. There is good, solid evidence that I played guitar in a comercially successful rock and roll band, married a woman named Winnie with whom I had two children, spent some time in prison, produced a number of top 40 albums, developed an internet search engine for a company named Google, and somehow wound up with a university degree in Physics. Although there is strong evidence that I did, in fact, do all of these things, I have no memory of having done any of them, and can only guess that years of drug abuse have created a giant void in my memory.
These days I'm clean and sober and will soon be opening a collective, worker owned Italian restaurant, while developing my ideas on Marxism in the twenty first century and composing film scores for socialist propaganda films. I am also working hard to remember things that happen to me again.
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