Originally published on The Agonist

Hey, John! John Bull! How you doing? It’s been a while – I don’t get many visitors these days you know. You’re looking great! I gotta say – I loved that wedding. Loved it! I saw all of it from the very beginning to that balcony scene at the end. I saw it live too – at 3:00 a.m. – right here in the hospital room. I was up anyway; I don’t sleep too well these days. I have to say, you guys really do that pageantry stuff better than anybody. The Pope could take some lessons from you, and those guys at the Vatican have a few millennia of practice at that sort of thing. And that Kate and William! What a lovely couple. Do you know they came to visit me right after the honeymoon? Very thoughtful, they were.

Hey, you wouldn’t mind putting on one of those white face masks, would you? These hospitals are just full of germs and you shouldn’t take any chances.

You heard about my illness, didn’t you? Something to do with my debt ceiling. My blood count was too high – reaching the limit – I couldn’t follow it all. They had all these specialists in Washington running around shouting at each other. It was all over the television channels. A real embarrassment, I tell you! Half of them were saying I needed even more blood transfusions, and the other half were saying maybe I should slow down a bit or even reduce my intake. I’m all in favor of that; I’d like to get back to where I was ten years ago, when I wasn’t stuck in a hospital bed.