J had a consultation with a surgeon today and will have his gallbladder removed next Monday at an ungodly hour. In case you didn't know, the gallbladder is a small organ that stores bile and squirts copious amounts of it into your digestive tract as soon as you yell your order into the clown's mouth. There's only one way into and out of the gallbladder and that's through the cystic duct, and when gallstones form they sometimes like to wander and have a nasty habit of getting wedged in this little tube, causing the woman in the illustration in the colorful informational brochure to cry out in pain as she holds the right side of her gut in hilarious anguish. Surgical removal of the gallbladder is aided by tiny video cameras and flashlights and a miniaturized Raquel Welch shouting at microscopic Donald Pleasence aboard a tiny Proteus submarine. Presumably the worthless pear-shaped organ is tied up in a plastic baggy and thrown into a barrel of medical-waste chum emblazoned with one of those symbols. J seems unperturbed by the prospect of surgery. Not me. I am perturbed. I routinely suffer discomposure by proxy. I seem to be surrounded by the carving of flesh these days. I am the calm eye of the surgery storm. I've also become intensely aware of my own gallbladder, naturally. By rights my gallbladder should be swollen to the size of a tetherball, seeing as how I've been producing bile at an expert level (a 78.4 on the standard Christopher Hitchens scale) since well before J experienced his first agonizing attack that left him crumpled and fetal and apparently unwilling to finish making me lunch.