The extraction of J's diseased, stone-laden viscus went well, and when I left his hospital room he was repeatedly clicking the button of the self-administered morphine drip. What a champ. Invasion of his trunk by stainless steel implements while under anesthetic left him logy and slack-jawed (remarkably similar to how I look when the conversation turns to your deepest core beliefs or a great meal you once had at Olive Garden of all places), but he had the presence of mind to ask me if I'd remembered to feed his dog (I had). I suppose it goes without saying that hospitals make me uneasy, filled as they are with the shuffling unwell and the menacing technologies of human frailty. We had to sit in a waiting area for twenty minutes across from the whitest family in the world, some kind of delegation from the planet of QVC appliqué sweaters, all of them staring at their cell phones like enraptured native children before missionary puppet theater. I tried not to do that thing I always do in hospitals, which is to become convinced that I can feel emanating from the chair the grim psychic residue of countless moments of anguish, the accumulated emotional sediment left by the repeated gut-punching impact of terrible news on loved ones. Instead I passed the time by dreaming up some hot new reality shows for the fall season, in the mostly unexplored sub-genre of Medical Catastrophe. Prognosis: Negative, Endoscope!, and Botched could all run on the same night, a cultural event in the making, must-see TV of the mondo voyeuristic variety. People like Paula Abdul and that loathsome Survivor fag who evaded his taxes could star in special two-hour pilot episodes, in fact one of the glorious twists of these new medical reality shows is that they can profitably recycle has-been stars of older reality shows as they fall to pieces once their fifteen minutes expire, offering their bodies as meat in exchange for just one more shot at national exposure. The public lust for ritualized self-degradation must be sated or it might find expression in messier and more troubling ways. I've read J. G. Ballard books, I know. If no one buys my shows and there's an alarming explosion of sadomasochistic sexuality in the high schools, well, don't come crying to me.