I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.

After college, I went on a real big classics kick. Read everything by Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Proust, Dostoevsky. And that classics train dropped me off at 'Dracula.' Halfway through it, I understood I'd never be going back, never 'leaving' the genre again. Since then, I've been on a fairly strict horror diet.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.