IT'S HALF PAST NOVEMBER: Do you know who your president is? I tried calling Cleo at the Psychic Readers Network, but her voice mail said she and her lawyers were down in Broward County, Florida, insisting in the courts that she really meant to vote for Pat Buchanan, not Al Gore.

  As I posted this, around beer-thirty on Nov. 16, the presidential contest was still closer than a pair of cousins from Deliverance, and it remains as perversely fascinating a spectacle as the sight of two fat chicks snatching each other bald-headed over the last pair of capri pants in a Wal-Mart bargain bin.

  Since Election Day, I have run a cyclo-cross race on a hard-frozen course in Colorado Springs, driven the American Cycling Association's race kit from and to Denver -- a five-hour round trip from Dog Mountain -- and struggled mightily to cobble together cartoons and columns for VeloNews and Bicycle Retailer & Industry News.

  But who can concentrate on cycling with phalanxes of lawyers, reporters and other predators descending upon Florida like pinstriped flying monkeys in some David Lynch remake of "The Wizard of Oz," all of them sworn to learn who voted for whom in an election so crucial that only half the nation's registered voters could be coaxed from their couches to mis-mark their ballots?

  It is the one time since I quit newspapering in 1991 that I have yearned to be back in a smoke-filled newsroom at two in the morning, drinking bad coffee, rewriting headlines and replating the front page amid curses from the composing room as a long night's work abruptly goes sideways faster than Missy Giove with a front flat.

  Y2K Revisited. It must be true what they say about the millennium beginning on Jan. 1, 2001, rather than a year earlier as the marketeers preferred (Y2K was ever so much more saleable). Jesus hasn't e-mailed to say he's coming back yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see him down at Target come New Year's Day, selling LeMond helmets.

  The portents have been everywhere. My faithful '83 Toyota, the invulnerable Vomit Comet, broke down in Boulder during a visit to VeloNews and had to be towed 150-odd miles to my mechanic in Pueblo.

  A giant German shepherd appeared from nowhere to accompany me on a pre-election cyclo-cross workout on my homemade course. He neither barked nor bit -- just galloped along beside me, and his technique over the barriers was better than mine.

  And the rusty trap door Phil Milburn has been standing on for years at USA Cycling finally creaked open, dumping him into the five-ringed septic tank that he and Lisa Voight have been filling with their Olympian effluent.

  If Any Man Have An Ear... Then there's this presidential election. If this isn't something straight out of the Book of Revelation, I don't know what is. Check out chapter 3, verses 15 and 16: "I know thy works; that thou art neither cold nor hot; I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth."

  Have you ever read a better description of Al Gore and George W. Bush, and the voters' response to their candidacies? Small wonder that when faced with a choice between two mutts -- Old Yeller and the Taco Bell chihuahua -- the American electorate split down the middle like an Icon stem.

  A dead Democrat beat a live Republican in Missouri, but Gore couldn't even win his own home state. As for Bush, his brother and fellow governor Jeb seemed incapable of presenting him with Florida's 25 electoral votes despite more evil-smelling irregularity than a Miami Beach nursing home.

  The Mark of the Beast. And as if that weren't bad enough, the U.S. Postal Service cycling team stands accused of employing a performance-enhancing substance containing calves' blood -- news even worse for the Lance Armstrong-focused cycling industry than the potential election of a pair of oilmen who think green is what you get for peddling your ass to the highest corporate bidder.

  Now, this charge comes from the French, who themselves are said to relish both horsemeat and Jerry Lewis. And the substances in question are not on the banned list. But after the events of the past few weeks, I'm on the lookout for signs, especially out of the Lone Star State, which employs a pentacle -- a five-pointed star -- as its emblem.

  And if it turns out that George W. Bush won the presidency by 666 votes, I want the UCI to frisk Lance for a set of udders.

  This column appeared in a slightly different form in Bicycle Retailer & Industry News.