It's about my wife, doctor....

DR. ACHILLES ROTH: What seems to be the problem?

Well, it all started with O.J.

Your wife and O.J.? I didn't know.

No, no, "O.J., The Trial," you know, the 24-hour coverage, the DNA, the missing golf bag, the bloody glove, the rate at which different flavors of ice cream melt....

Go on.

Well, after that was all over I thought, "Okay, that's that, done with, now life will get back to normal." But then came the impeachment hearings and the All-Monica-All-the Time channel –– was it MSNBC? Then there was the Elian Gonzales thing, the Concord crash, and now –– and this is the worst of all –– the West Palm Beach manual recount.

Forget about the manual recount, what about Emmanuel Kant?

Listen, Doc, this is no time for jokes.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. Your wife, if I may say so, sounds a little like what we used to call "ein Krisishund" –– how you say in America?

Disaster junky?

Precisely. Please to describe the symptoms in more detail.

It's a nightmare. She won't eat, answer phone calls, read her e-mail. She just sits in front of the TV watching those little numbers at the bottom of the screen go up and down, down and up, moaning piteously at every injunction filed, cursing night and day at all the talking heads.

It's hard to describe the frightening concentration with which she stares at the TV, Doc. She thinks she can mentally affect the results if she stares at the screen ferociously enough. Nothing can soothe her obsession. It's as if she were hooked up to an IV and the recount numbers were the drip. The house is a disaster, my son and I have been eating cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the past week. She roams around in the middle of the night like Lady Macbeth, mumbling obscure statistics, the latest polling abuses. She interrupts my calls at the office to complain, "Honey, can you believe it, Broward County has refused a hand count, even though Al Gore got four more votes in the one percent they've counted so far."

I'm losing her, Doc, and I'm worried. The voices drone on night and day, splenetic right-wingers and spin-cycle democrats endlessly reiterating their points like some existential idea of hell. I'm starting to think this must be what hell is like. Very bureaucratic discussions about minute pieces of paper, preferably piped in night and day. Or maybe they do this in prisoner of war situations. There's no faster way to break a man.

It's like Groundhog Day here; every morning we're in the same place we were last Wednesday. This thing will never be resolved until the politicians do the right thing, and you know that'll never happen, so I just see her slipping further and further down the slippery slope. When, at some ungodly hour in the morning I heard the good wife wailing, "Why in god's name won't they count the pregnant chad?" I momentarily felt compassion for the fate of the wriggly little things. I even thought of starting an advocacy group. Then I remembered that these were not spawning salmon but a tabulating anomaly. A new word has entered the national lexicon, Doc: the chad. Heretofore I'd thought Chad was a lake in Africa (or half of a sixties pop duo).

The chad, in case you've been out of the country (or in a coma), is a little piece of cardboard that does or does not detach when you punch the ballot on antique voting machines. But it ain't a simple either/or situation. This chad seems to have more states than a subatomic particle. There's the hanging chad, the swinging chad, the tri-chad, the dimpled chad, and –– that most heart-wrenching condition of all –– the pregnant chad. Sounds like an endangered species. With the spurning of the pregnant chad, a chill ran down my spine. The wife began to slip into dementia.

Just a minute ago, the crawl at the bottom of the TV screen said, "FLORIDA JUDGE EXPECTED TO RULE ANY MINUTE ON THE DEADLINE FOR THE MANUAL RECOUNT." My wife turned to me wistfully, "Do you think I have time for a bath?" The look on her face said she didn't.