Two weeks and a dozen mistresses later, Tiger Woods is in a free fall.  I feel so badly for him.

When the first escort went public I wrote a column about how typical it is for some powerful men to want it all; the prestige, the wife, the cute kids, the mistress.  But this is different.  Tiger’s wife Elin is rightly getting all the support.  In seclusion, away from adoring fans and advertisers but no farther from what he has done than his own pulse, Tiger Woods must feel quite alone.

I’m as much absorbed in the coverage of Tiger’s predicament as I am in the drama itself.  For once, every supermarket tabloid with Woods and his wife on the cover seems worth the $3.99.   The brainy ABC news anchor Charlie Gibson finds Tiger’s story intriguing for its elements of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy.  The women on The View debate whether Tiger should consent to an interview to repair his image.  Financial channels discuss how the PGA will survive without the man who is the sport of golf.  Saturday Night Live did a hilarious satire last weekend of how other unfaithful men like former Presidential candidate John Edwards, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer are bitter because their stories of infidelity don’t get attention anymore.

Some advertisers are now dropping Woods because he no longer represents what they sell, like the financial house Accenture trying to build trust with its customers in a recession.  Of the many adjectives that describe Tiger Woods, trust is probably at the bottom of the list now.    On the other hand, a 30-something amateur golfer proudly wore his Tiger Woods hat on the links the other day.  Interviewed on the news he said he wears the hat because of Tiger Woods the golfer, not Tiger Woods the man.

The gorgeous foreign-born wife, the stricken, hospitalized mother-in-law, the voice mail begging a mistress for help covering up because the wife is calling unfamiliar phone numbers, the $12,000,000.00 post-nuptial agreement, and the confounding expectation Tiger Woods thought he could keep his dalliances a secret indefinitely: How about those kiss-and-tell mistresses?  Tiger told each one he loved them most and they seemed to believe it.  Why?  Was it the Midas touch or something completely lacking in the girls, or both?  Combine the realms of corporate with marriage, athletics with sex, hero status with money and jeez, there’s something for everyone in this mess.

Unlike people lashing out with anger on message boards,  I’m fascinated by the pathology of what happened to Tiger.  How could a man  so disciplined in his sport be so utterly sloppy with his love life?  Dismissing it as sex addiction or steroidal powerful-men-who-lust  touches the branch but not the root.

When psychotherapy uncovers the reason for Tiger’s behavior, it will surely be the one element of this story Tiger manages to keep to himself.  Against a flood of personal and embarrassing revelations, at his core, Tiger Woods is still a man of mystery.

I know Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is real busy these days trying to lead the world out of a recession,  but if he wants to do something truly useful, he’ll abolish the penny.  Abraham Lincoln belongs in our hearts but not on our money anymore.  As a speech writer, his value has increased with time.  As a coin? Not so much.

I’ve been changing my penny strategy all my life.   When I was much younger, I used a few of them to buy things.  In fact,  just one of them bought a whole piece of candy at the Penny Candy Store.   The only penny candy store I know of today is on Cape Cod, in Chatham.  Like the bulk section of Wegmans, candy isn’t sold by the penny anymore, it’s sold by the pound.

For awhile, I put my pennies in a jar and devoted a couple of hours per year to rolling them in paper and bringing them to the bank for some money that meant something.  Like quarters.  That’s real pocket change.  They’re big and heavy and just eight of them are all Christian needs to buy his school lunch each day.  Quarters count.  But after all that work rolling pennies and having the bank take a percentage for the trouble of counting them again, your pennies are worth less than well, a penny, and the only place that’s supposed to happen is at the gas station where for some mysterious reason, a gallon of gas is priced by the tenth of a penny and it doesn’t take an investigative reporter to know the stations are keeping that tenth of a cent for themselves.  With all those tenths of a cent they’ve collected from me through the years I could have bought a cup of coffee by now.

My most recent strategy involved loading up the pockets of my winter jackets with pennies so I could conveniently pay the pennies of the purchase first, even with credit cards, and not have to fish among the real coins in my wallet.  I was certain I’d use all my pennies by now, so either I didn’t buy much this winter or more likely, the pennies kept replenishing themselves like everything else I’m trying to get rid of like the leaves beside my driveway.  I don’t know where they come from, they just come, and since I can’t get rid of them by myself it’s time for the government to step in and regulate me.  Heck, it’s regulating everything else.

But enough about me.  The most compelling reason to ditch the penny is, the economy could use the help.  We could hire the millions of very smart, very unemployed people to retool the system to round up or down to the nearest nickel.  I’ve heard it could be a real fiasco for all the cash registers, but cash registers aren’t doing anything else right now, so they might as well reinvent themselves like the rest of us.  And if we could go on after Windows Vista, can’t we move on after anything?

Remember the global tizzy about Y2K?  Every computer everywhere was supposed to crash as we entered a new millenium and people used this as an excuse to go out and buy six month’s of provisions; canned hash, Lee rider jeans, milk in cardboard cartons,  items that no one would ever otherwise buy.  We need to start buying just like that again.  And after all that worry that the world would end, what happened at the dawn of the 21st century?  Nothing.  We woke up.  It was just another day at the office.

Americans unite.  It’s time to ditch the penny.  Real soon.  Because even in Syracuse, the warm weather is coming and I won’t need a jacket for my pennies anymore.