I’m having a lot of anonymity moments these days, which would be depressing if they didn’t somehow benefit me.

They don’t always benefit me. A few minutes ago, I was refused entry to the congressional lunchroom ’cause they thought I was just some wandering schmoe. It took a lot of fancy document fishing to prove to them I was a duly-elected congressschmoe. But yesterday, when I sat in the crowd watching the shallow grilling of Kathleen Sebelius, I was glad no one realized I was, in some sense, an interested party. Truth is, it wasn’t that interesting and it was no party.

Inspirational to some, however, as it seems to have given the visiting schoolkids ideas for a host of keen costumes on this terrifying day. While walking down the hallways of the Capitol this morning, I encountered a multitude of bone-chilling Halloween outfits.

One very clever kid came as Marsha Blackburn, shrilly navigating the corridors of power with unsettling authenticity. Another wore a latex iteration of the inner and outer decrepitude of freshman congressman Ted Yoho, once a veterinarian, now, himself, a howling lunatic, oblivious to the tangible details of the world around him. If Yoho operated on a canine’s spleen today, he would probably replace it with an alarm clock.

And I saw a little boy wearing one of those Steny Hoyer whole-head masks they advertise in the back of comic books. He was even carrying a root beer.

Now, they all seem to be in the lunchroom. Cheezits, they let a bunch of costumed kids in but they had to be convinced to let me enter. Wow, is that a Henry Waxman costume or is it Mel Blanc?

Boy, sometimes I’m really stupid. Those aren’t costumes. Those are the real reps.

I should have known.

Costumes could never be that scary.

What kind of a name is Steny, anyway? I suppose I could ask him. Or Google it. For some reason, I experience it as a diminution of something Greek.

I don’t know him very well, but I see him as Joe Biden’s tougher brother, the guy who beat up the kids who didn’t fall for the smile. Not that he’s mean, though, just tough. Sometimes, it looks as if he and Jim Clyburn are really working as Nancy Pelosi’s bodyguards. I guess he learned to be that way all those years ago in the rough and tumble sandlot, protecting Joe. That’s the scenario I’ve whipped up, anyhow. I’ve come to think of him as “Uncle Steny.”

He has this tradition of giving each new member of the Democratic caucus a root beer in each of the member’s first thirty days. Since I’m the only guy in his first thirty days, all of Uncle Steny’s ice cold root beer, complete with properly bent straws, comes to me, in great, longneck, Mexican-style bottles, made, I’ll bet, with real sugar. I don’t even know if they have root beer in Mexico, but if they do, Uncle Steny probably got several cases as a thank you gift back when NAFTA kicked in and has carefully doled them out to new members ever since. This would be unimaginable if the recipient were, say, Utah Senator Mike Lee. who’d hole up in his quarters and plow, alone, through every bottle in every case. They’d find him several days later, dead in his rooming house, lying in a pool of his own carbonation.

Nah. Probably he’d save one bottle for his besty, Rafael Cruz, which would serve as the wafer thin mint he never had, preventing his expulsive demise. Oh, to have such a pal as Rafael, just down from Canada, who can sit at the uncool table with you, pretending better than you ever could that the cool kids’ table was full of losers and your table was the place to eat mayonnaise-laden peanut butter sandwiches just like real Americans do.

Sandwiches…

I refocused on the Louisiana senator’s breasts.

It may have been labeled a janitorial closet but the space, neither on the Senate side of the building nor physically beholden to the House, contained little in the way of cleaning supplies. Truth be told, it could easily have served as a Coney Island appetizing shop. ‘Neath our toes was a multi-layered collection of discarded condoms dating back to the mid, perhaps late, 1850s. They appeared to be made of lace or bustle material and merely looking at them made the memory of Grandma’s doilies yelp with dormant entendres that had just about given up on being heard.

I suppose the shoe-level forest of petrified protection could have served as a necessary reminder, but I had no need of condoms, not simply because Senator Landrieu had used her last egg at a Loozyana crawdad boil several years earlier but because, in a nod to her marriage and some kind of technical Christian propriety upon which she insisted, remained limited to above the waist contact.

My mind wandered to Steny Hoyer’s root beer.