I have much to do before returning to my city from my temporary exile. It is only a temporary return. Still, I will have to launder, clean dishes and generally order where I have been before going back to where I have been. Another where I have been. The preferred where.

Not enough time. Plenty of time.

Not enough time.

The bus leaves at 11:59 PM.

One minute before what?

Needless to say, the tuft of misplaced Pharaoh Jr.-like hair made me very self-conscious. In a room full of tables, I had to decide who was unimportant enough to see my imperfect head, using an improvised sort of mini-hirsutism triage. Trust me, it did not help that when I went to the bathroom, I discovered my undershorts were on backward.

No hosehole.

But yes … an asshole.

The thing about clothes is they don’t always feel like they look, so if you’re a prisoner of the way you feel, you can’t always be saved by the way you look. Call it The Anorexic’s Dilemma.

I did not bring my best attire when I came down from New York.

But the stuff I did bring did fit, at least it looked like it did.

At the synagogue, however, the way it felt made me interact uncomfortably with people; I feared I looked like I felt, which caused me to make certain that was so.

For week 2, I forced myself to remember to physically relax, to not give in to the fear. And they was diggin’ me, insofar as I can ascertain such things.

Then my sister pointed out that when I’d shaved my head, I’d left a big bushy spot behind the ear.

Well, she called it a small spot.

But it felt big.

Bonnie Franklin, who died the other day, was a nice woman. I sat next to her at the table read for my first television show as an actor.

I only had a small part, playing an office boy, but the comic moment was pretty much mine and I worked with Franklin, Richard Erdman and John Hillerman, not bad for a frosh.

At the table, I whispered ideas to her, both to impress and to introduce my notions without risking visible rejection. She repeated one or more of them to the others, just as Carl Reiner did Neil Simon’s whispered constructs during Caesar sessions in the ’50s. (Don’t think I’m comparing myself to Neil Simon, although I am.)

She didn’t blink an eye as I changed my lines every day to make them fresher and funnier (and less hokey), not even when I even ad libbed in front of a live audience on tape day.

If I had any complaint, it would be, well, not so much a complaint as disappointment that she seemed more like a regular woman who maybe worked with your mother than the hormone-stirring figure I had masturbated to as she sang some song in a chanteuse gown on TV a year or two earlier.

But then, that hormone stirring might have been as much about me as about her.

Last night at the synagogue, they were enlisting us to sing along with some simplistic children’s song about creation, the grown-ups providing the rhythmic background, “God_God_G0d_God.”

There was, I thought, something fishy about this, so I substituted, “cod_cod_cod,”  but then I switched to, “Darwin_Darwin_Darwin,” like “trouble”  in River City.

Today, I picked up two weeks of dog shit from the deck out back, with a gloved hand and a disgusted heart.

I’m tryin’ my damnedest to do life-embracing things, since I do, you know, in my mind, even if my circumstances, geographic location, and sense of futility thwart the practice. That’s what the trip to DC to drop off my niece was about. I went along for the ride even though we were coming right back because it was getting out there. And wouldn’tja know? The Great Cupcake Adventure unexpectedly ensued.

Similarly, I went to the synagogue last Friday, though I was right and all the women were all wives and mothers; if one wasn’t I didn’t know. The rabbi wasn’t as hot as I thought, not in her Wonder Woman costume anyway, which revealed her “angel wings” (I don’t always dislike them), that were otherwise appropriate enough.

So, I flirted with a dark, compelling married woman sitting beside her son and husband, which went over slightly better than you might expect (but only slightly). I felt increasingly unattractive in  my clothes, despite the professionally bottled moonshine doled out in the sanctuary of sorts. My movement grew tight. The chocolate hamantaschen wasn’t good.

And it disappeared quickly.

I am going back tonight. To embrace life.

And free food.

Bonus “Think” Piece

We once had some great fat men in this country. Not just funnymen like Jackie Gleason and men-about-town like Diamond Jim Brady, but also fat athletes like Babe Ruth.

We even had a president so fat he got stuck in the White House bathtub and did we consign him to the dustbin of history as we have more recent national figures of ridicule? No, he was no Dan Quayle or Anthony Weiner (hee-hee), this man was extricated with the best technology available (which may have been a pat of butter) and went on to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the only former president to have done so.

So, where have all the fat men gone?

The public ones, I mean.

With the exception of President John Travolta, no contemporary figure of girth has been allowed to scale the heights of public seriousness since the early part of the last century (Raymond Burr might have managed had he not been a Canadian and in a wheelchair).

This explains, I think, Chris Christie’s decision to embrace the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare. He wants to make sure no American, no matter how fat, is forced to endure impersonal, long distance medical analysis, as he did from merciless former White House physician, Connie Mariano, who, um, weighed in on his condition from Colorado, a land so far from New Jersey that not even Sarah Palin could see one from the other. By allowing Medicaid expansion in his state, Christie ensures that every New Jerseyan can have a local doctor to examine him directly, freeing all healthy men, lean or large, no matter how poor, to compete in a Republican free market of heft, in hopes one unlikely New Jerseyan may become the second fat Garden Stater, after Travolta, to take the highest office in the land.

Of course, since Travolta, there has been no bald American president either, and this needs remedying too.

And how about those beards? Once upon a time, beards meant presidential power.

Why, one president even got his beard caught the White House pepper grinder.

Okay, that didn’t happen.

But some people think Taft never got stuck in a bathtub, so all bets are off.

Often, no, most of the time, when I’m down here it feels like I could be in just about any suburb in America, even though the political intrigue of DC is less than 13 miles away. My sisters don’t act like Washingtonians and I don’t think they feel like they are either. They are citizens of Costco and Starbucks and Wegmans supermarket and the increasingly complex — geometrically, anyway — “strip” malls which are the dots the lines of their daily lives connect. These dots and lines reveal a serrated picture that, to me, is sometimes soothing, often boring, periodically compelling and somehow wrong.

Last week, though, even before the Italian dinner at which I was the well-known Mister Funny, we drove in, early AM, to drop off my niece at Union Station. The younger niece wanted to go to Georgetown Cupcakes (it’s famous!), which I was certain would be open, since what kind of bakery ignores a breakfast crowd?

It was closed ’til 10.

But the wise management of Sprinkles, just down the street, flung open their doors at the crack of 9, so we went there instead.

I thought.

However, my niece still wanted to go to the other one.

And we did.

Then, while we were waiting in line (they only allowed a few people in at a time, like the Loft Bar in Edinburgh on a busy night), some bicyclists shouted that another place, Baked and Wired, was better.

So, we went!  

We took all the cupcakes home — 9 between the 3 of us — and shared them that night. Sprinkles was best.

Apparently, the owner is a judge on “Cupcake Wars.” His or her jurisprudential chops — cupcake-wise — are sound.

City livin’, baby.

Oliver Douglas don’t know shit.

No, I’m pretty sure they didn’t use the word “nasty.” I’m not nasty, generally. But I liked the notion of it having been among the hurled, as it seemed a vital part of the hilarity-underscoring portrait of the compleat comedian that the rest of the scenario was painting.

I used the word nasty later the same night in a suggested response to an unpleasant message my niece received from a classmate. I opined that a simple, “Fuck you, you nasty prick,” followed by silence would be just the stuff. My niece didn’t know what “prick” meant in that context.

How we laughed, nasty as we are.

The waitress pronounced that I had the best personality of anyone who’d ever been a customer. And this was a major restaurant in the heart of Washington DC.

I must be a comedian, she said. An ordinary person couldn’t possibly be so funny.

I told her my sisters had been saying how funny I was all day. They’d used words like “snappish,” “mean,” “critical.” I’m not sure whether they said, “nasty.”

As I informed the enthusing server that my sisters likewise found me funny, my sisters laughed.