Are we really ready to revisit 2020? Here goes...

As I recall, the assignment for this 1997 poem was just to make an analogy between two things. I chose to compare moral relativism (which I was enamored with at the time, being 21) with a Möbius strip, and I thought it would be clever to turn the poem in on a Möbius strip so that there was no clear start or end point. It took some doing to get the sides of the paper to line up (since we had to print, not hand-write, our assignments) and to get the splice in the middle of a line so that readers couldn't assume it was the starting point.

Written for a poetry class in 1997, this is a reflection on the proverb "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" and the joke attributed to Groucho Marx, "Absence makes the heart go yonder." It may go without saying that I was in a long-distance relationship at the time.

The following lyrics were written to be background music (by imaginary band Mendelion Seeds) for my 1992 novella "First Person." They were meant to be a synthesis of "Your Wildest Dreams" by the Moody Blues, "Portrait of the Lady as a Young Artist" by Sea Train, and "Perfect Lover" by Kansas. I intentionally chose a very tricky rhyme scheme (ABCBDDDEBE) and rhythm (trochaic for the first four lines of each stanza alternating 8 and 6 feet, then anapestic quadrameter for the rest), and I found the structure helped.

In 1993 I was a junior in high school, studying The Canterbury Tales. We were given an assignment to write a Chaucerian sonnet from the point of view of an elevator operator whose elevator gets stuck between floors while a group of high school students is on a field trip. I chose to write about a debate student, and I had a specific senior in mind. I chose to spell debater with an -or because I felt that made it seem more a part of his identity.

Sometime around the turn of the century, my parents and I met up at my sister's house in Pittsburgh for Christmas. 'Becca lives in Squirrel Hill, a very ethnically diverse neighborhood, and just a block from her house I found a Belarusian import store. I was unfamiliar with Belarusian imports, so I took my time looking at them and trying to identify whether the customers were speaking with the proprietor in Russian or some other language. It sounded close enough that I thought I could put my college Russian to use.

I was a little vague in January when we wrote up our annual letter, and I left out some important details. The revised version is attached.

When I was a teenager, for whatever reason one of my favorite summertime activities was to go out on the country roads east of Bartlesville and pick up recyclables. I called it "canpicking."  I would generally do this on a bicycle, and usually alone, but sometimes I brought friends. We'd hang bulging bags of cans and bottles from the handlebars, and if we crushed the cans tightly enough, we could sell enough at the recycling center in Dewey to afford a can of pop for the return trip. (We rarely brought any water with us, even in the peak of summer.)

Music & lyrics by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher. Autoharp arrangement by Ben Stallings.

Note: The final verse of this song is supposed to be a half-step higher than the first two. However, the only major keys my autoharp has that are half a step apart are E and F, and I don't have all the necessary chords to play it in E. So what I have notated instead is F to G, going up a whole step on the last note of the bridge.

• A Russian-American comedian I heard on BBC world service a few minutes ago was just saying how in the Soviet Union, when someone important died they would broadcast Swan Lake for 24 hours on all stations with no explanation, causing everyone who lived through it to develop a pavlovian stress response to the music. So here I am a few minutes later minding my own business, and what starts playing in the next room? Daaaaaa da da da da daaaaaa da daaaaaa...