The thunder of Zeus be upon me this time, mortals.  I have failed you.  And I’m a big enough god to admit it. It is difficult for me to do this, but my sponsor, Demeter, has convinced me that the path to recovery begins with honesty.

And so I must confess that while the ships of men were engaged in a life-or-death struggle on my seas, I was nowhere to be found.  In fact, I only knew about it after the battle was done.  The fact is, mortals, that I, the great and terrible Poseidon, was on a bit of a bender.  I had drunk deep from the nectar of Bacchus and breathed heavily from the smoke of the oracle, and was pretty much out to lunch the whole time.

The divine truth is this: I have a problem.

O, cursed fate!  That this immortal life should yield such despair, such weakness!  I used to be bigger than Jesus.  I used to be Jesus.  Men worshipped me, prayed to me.  Lived and died at the mercy of my whims.  And then, in an eye-blink of eternity, it was all suddenly gone, leaving me holding the bag.  (I keep the fates in a bag since my divorce.)

Then, the millennia of waiting.  The silence, the banal, evil, crushing silence of mankind.  Some of we Olympians began to doubt the very existence of your souls, leaving a great void in our spiritual life.  For what meaning can there be to a world of clockmakers without clocks?  What is a god without his creations?  If men did not exist, it would become necessary to invent them.  And who wants to go through that whole business again?

But I chose faith.  I chose to see what was clear before my eyes, that your souls were indeed there—only astray.  Your prayers were not absent; they were simply directed elsewhere.  And with a little patience, a little grace, I might hear them again.

I wish I could say that my faith has been unwavering.  But I have been tested, mortals.  And your silence fills me with a sadness so deep I can only fill it with wine, and an anger so hot I can only cool it with bong water.  I am omnipotent, mortals, but I’m not perfect!

So I was not there to see your standoff.  But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.  I was not called upon.  No prayers reached me.  Even in a crisis on the seas seen round the world, no one saw me, the one true god of the deep.

But I do not ask for your pity, mortals.  I still rule the oceans.  I am still master of all things wet.  I still carry your pitiful lives in my hands.  I am a great and terrible god, and you shall soon learn to worship me as of old!

In the meantime, though, my name is Poseidon, and I’m an addict.

The thunder of Zeus be upon you, O mortals!  The hour of gloom has arrived!

But fear not, mortals.  For in your darkest hour—8:30 to 9:30 pm last Saturday—I, the great and terrible Poseidon, was completely available to you.  Should you have desired my presence or guidance, say in matters of religious worship, I would have been able and willing to oblige you.

And yet I received no prayers.  No worship, no devotion, no thoughts, no afterthoughts.  It is as though you want your triremes to be sunk!

Fools!  Do you not sense my power?  Do you not believe we immortals to be guiding the hand of fate?  Do you not see that I am as good a god as any?

My seas are rising, mortals.  My fury boils the very oceans.  So you find an hour of night to leave dark in my honor.  And I see the great landmarks of the world grow dim: the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Empire State Building in New York, the dome of St. Peters in the Vatican—that crackpot outpost of newfangled monotheism.  (Give me a good Parthenon any day.)

But your hearts weren’t in it.  You believed Earth Hour to be a symbol of the need for conservation.  But you did not believe me to be the symbol of that symbol.

I cannot go on waiting by the phone for you to pray, mortals.  There are better things for we omnipotent deities to do with our Saturday nights.  Athena has been calling again.  I still enjoy being with her, but all she ever wants to do is talk about the old days, and that’s just not constructive for me at this point.  She acts as though we should forget ourselves because we’ve been forgotten.  That feels like a cop-out to me.

I refuse to move on, mortals, for my hour will come!

The thunder of Zeus be upon you, O mortals!  Australia, the Great Desert, burns!

For I am Poseidon, master of the seas, lord of all things wet, and I have returned to claim my rightful place as a famous god.

I have been patient these past millennia, mortals.  I have awaited your worship, your prayers, your goodly sacrifices.  I have activated a Facebook account and long expected your friend requests.  And yet it appears that you have chosen to forget me: great, godly, terrible Poseidon.

Your ignorance has sparked my anger, your insolence has kindled it, and your arrogance has set it all ablaze!  The wildfires of Australia are merely emblematic of the awesome metaphorical heat of my rage.

I once believed my celebrity was assured.  You knew that the triremes sailed only at my pleasure.  You sensed how the smooth passage of your trade or the glorious victories of your wars were the gifts of my benevolence.  I was some deity.

And now I am all but forgotten.  Admired perhaps, but never loved.  Along came all those younger, next-best-thing gods, with their fresh visages and hip new centers of geopolitical power, and you fickle worshippers tossed me out like so much omnipotent garbage.

A few thousands years pass, and now look at me.  Look at me, mortals!  I’ve gained weight.  All that ice I fought so hard to keep on in the early days is turning into water.  I feel warm all the time.  There’s a patch of garbage the size of Texas on my back that I should really get looked at.  I’ve got higher mercury than Jeremy Piven—but he’s the one David Mamet makes a joke about.

Not worth a joke, no, alas, no!  Certainly not worth a sacrifice.  And it turns out, not even worth a decent movie.  (If you ask me, Wolfgang Peterson has just been phoning it in since Das Boot.)

At one point, I caught myself thinking: What happened?  I used to be such a big god.

And then I understood.  I’m still big.  It’s the religions that got small.

Mark me now, all; sailors, potters, philosophers, dramatists all: I, Poseidon, immortal Olympian and architect of fate, will no longer suffer your betrayal.  I will see my horse sacrifices performed with all due ceremonial ritual—in ancient Greek—or the fury of my comeback will know no bounds on this earth.

Australia is beginning to understand what you will all know soon enough: the inconvenient truth that I, Poseidon, have returned!