As I gracefully grow more debauched and depraved

I am twenty-five years old. This time of year in 1981, my mother lost the crown on her tooth to a Tootsie Roll and as a dentist's appointment would have been most convenient, instead the next day I was born. My father says that he took his first look at me, prepared to lie for love of my mother—Love, she's beautiful—and millions of years of selfish genes slammed him in the back of the head and he found that he believed what he said: Love, she's beautiful . . . And I slept in the same crib as three cats, but that was later. It's strange to grow older than characters you once thought were grown up.

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look behind from where we came
And go round and round and round in the circle game