The Best Thing A Mother Can Do For Her Newborn Is Poop On His Or Her Head

Last month the Book Club read Jessica Snyder Sachs' Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World. If you're inclined to freak out about superscary and mysterious bacterial infections such as MRSA for example, it's a frightening read. Overall, however, it's actually a compelling call to action: One of the salient points Sachs gets across is that antibiotics — once very widely used and still rather widely used — disrupt the body's native microflora.

An antibiotic is like a nuclear weapon — yes, while antibiotics are effective at killing bad bacteria they also wipe out a body's "good" bacteria. If you or someone you know ever became ill with a subsequent infection after using an antibiotic (or even just had diarrhea) this is what is happening.

Over and over Sachs drives home the point that we have become "too clean" — for more than 50 years, scientists and researchers and drug companies have quixotically and simplistically attempted to eradicate bad bacteria vis a vis antibiotics and antibacterial cleaners without fully understanding the delicate ecosystem of the bacterial world. And even if you yourself abandon antibacterial hand soap and house cleaners in favor of good old vinegar and non-antibacterial products, it's actually too late — because everyone else is using these items and subsequently increasing germ resistance. You've probably heard these theories in some shape or form before and Good Germs, Bad Germs is a good primer on exactly how this all works.

One thing I didn't really understand was how antibiotics worked in poultry and livestock. I mistakenly assumed antibiotic use in animals was a prophylactic to prevent sickness. It is that but antibiotics are also used in livestock because many years ago scientists discovered that antibiotics also sped up growth, giving farmers an added economic incentive to mix them in with animal feed. It's unclear that these antibiotics are contributing to germ resistance, but a larger lesson the book hammers home is that over the years nearly every example of antibiotic research produced unintended consequences that either didn't help or even eventually made things worse.

Although it's a relatively quick read, Good Germs, Bad Germs can be thick with details; you may find yourself flipping back and forth to remember all the exotic Latin names of different bacteria. Some passages however are gripping. An early section about how a human baby develops a healthy mature immune system, for example, will blow your mind. I had no idea this was what happened:

Like the colonization of the mouth and the skin, that of the human digestive tract — home to 99 percent of the body's microflora — begins during birth, starting with the lactobacilli encountered in the birth canal. As the baby's head crowns, it compresses the mother's rectum, pushing out a small amount of stool. Though doctors and nurses move quickly to wipe away the offense, their squeamishness may run counter to nature's purpose — an immediate and direct inoculation of the newborn with the mother's own intestinal bacteria. If so, it's no coincidence but rather the result of natural selection that a newborn's head typically faces in the direction of its mother's rectum when its head first emerges and remains there until the next contraction delivers the shoulders and the rest of the body. This head-to-anus juxtaposition ensures that, of all the billions of microbes the baby will meet in its first day of life, the first will be those to which its mother's immune system has already developed protective antibodies. . . . A chaser of breast milk delivers the second wave: millions of bifidobacteria

Suffice it to say, Holy Moly.

Basically, babies are immunological blank slates for several years while their immune systems develop. And the book goes on to explain that if you have allergies, it might have something to do with not coming in contact with these helpful bacteria early on — babies born via C-section instead of vaginal childbirth miss out on all that helpful vaginal bacteria and stool. And breast feeding seems to be as much about the bacteria on a breast as it is the milk itself. It's a fascinating read.

Speaking of allergies, if you grew up in an era before parents and schools freaked out about peanut products and maybe you have a cynical "harrumph" reaction to all these newfangled food allergies, Good Germs, Bad Germs is helpful as well — basically the rise in instances of weird food allergies and mysterious autoimmune ailments like Irritable Bowel Syndrome is related to a general imbalance in our bacterial ecosystem. You'll understand it, feel sorry for the people who suffer from these ailments and if you are of childbearing age, you might strongly consider pooping on your newborn's head — if not often, then at least early.

The good news is that there's a way out — love good bacteria, and don't try to wipe them out with antibiotics. Doctors have got this message and are doing their part in no longer overprescribing antibiotics. These things change slowly, but they're changing — though you might remember (recently even) being prescribed antibiotics before minor dental work, for example — apparently this is an example of a surgeon covering his or her ass.

But the biggest thing we can do that we actually have control over is eating yogurt — or at least somehow getting a "probiotic" like Lactobacillus GG. This good bacteria travels through your gastrointestinal system and helps keep a healthy balance among the body's microflora. We traveled to India in 2007 and ate yogurt every morning — and we never had any stomach trouble. We only vaguely understood what the yogurt was doing — our driver said something along the lines of that the yogurt had local enzymes that made us adjust to the food — now I guess I understand that it was the live lactobacillus cultures that assist the microflora in our digestive tracts. We repeated — and evangelized — this strategy on our recent trip to Egypt and Jordan — it worked for me again (not sure about the others though).

Columbine

We were covering one of the World Wars when I was doing my student teaching, and the topic of the day for my first ever class actually teaching went over something about chemical weaponry. I wanted to write World War II, but now that I think about it, it was probably World War I — but at any rate, the lesson that day went over some material about the use of chemical weapons.

I was nervous to teach a real lesson for the first time and I kept trying to remember everything I learned while promptly forgetting the most important lesson of all, which is to breathe, which my master teacher (i.e., the guy who was gracious enough to let me take over his class while he showed me how to become a teacher) helpfully reminded me in the passing period following that first class.

The other helpful tip he gave me after that first class was to ditch the part of my spiel about how to make chlorine gas.

It was a simple mistake — I was trying to "activate prior knowledge" and develop an "anticipatory set" about chemical weaponry, and in doing so I recounted my days working at Baskin-Robbins and a mistake I made just once mixing two different cleaners in a mop bucket.

"You can't do that," Chris, my master teacher explained, "One of these guys will probably want to try it."

So the rest of the day I had to use some other anticipatory set about chemical weaponry — can't remember what it would be and I remember very little about that day except for breathing and how it's important not to teach juniors about easy ways to make chlorine gas. That's nothing to sneeze at; these are two very important life lessons that are better learned sooner rather than later.

I can't remember which teacher it was who explained to me that some of the children you will teach will literally be psychopaths, and that there's not a whole lot you can do to get through to them, but in my mind I conflate these two memories — of learning that some of the kids you get a classroom will be psychopaths and in general avoiding showing a child how to make chemical gases. Memory is weird like that.

Imperfect memories are a recurring theme in Dave Cullen's Columbine. The theme of homemade explosives also features prominently in the book. It's a very good book. We just read it for book club, and schools and education and memories about this horrible episode in particular have been floating around my head for the last week since I read it.

The Columbine tragedy is not the kind of thing I like to read about, but Michael, who picked the book, said it was really good, so we read it. Before reading Columbine I would have been happy going my entire life never again having to think about it. When it happened I remember thinking something along the lines of that it was embarrassing for the United States — there had been a few school shootings before it, and of course Oklahoma City and Waco, and for an American, the 1990s looked like an era of self-hatred, self-destruction and self-immolation. You know, that old barstool theory of how without the Russians we just have to turn on something and it looks like it's ourselves.

I suppose it's strange and adolescent to react with "embarrassment" about kids blowing up schools, but that's what I felt at the time — I don't mind owning up to it — I was in my 20s. And I probably felt this way until 2001 when for me what the world thought of the U.S. ceased to be important. (I never understand the preoccupation with worrying about whether 60 percent or 40 percent of Pakistanis have a "very unfavorable" view of the U.S. It's been fairly constant through the 2000s — see page 94 of this .pdf, for example, and I seem to remember similar numbers going back into the 1990s, before Pew did their surveys. Point being, why care that much if the numbers will barely budge? Compare the numbers for Indonesia and Pakistan during 2002 and 2003 and you'll see what I'm talking about; public opinion is fickle, international public opinion even more so.)

The other thing I remember thinking during Columbine was "Fuck, how am I going to talk about this on the radio?"

At the time I was working in the superintendent's office of a medium-sized school district, and the communications director thought it would be good for me to pitch in occasionally with stuff like the five-minute Friday afternoon radio feature on the local radio station. She usually did it but when she was unavailable — or no one was available — I would help out. I'm happy to have had the opportunity to try to do it — I wasn't very good at it (that whole breathing thing I mentioned above) but it was cool to try to help out. Most of the time it was just a list of announcements, so it wasn't too difficult. I only did it a handful of times. And the Friday after the Columbine shootings was one of those times.

I prepared a statement in my mind that went something like, "First of all, our thoughts and prayers go out to the school community at Columbine High School and community of Littleton, Colorado." I don't remember anything I said after that.

And I hope the host didn't ask the logical follow-up question, which to me would be something along the lines of, "And what are we doing to make sure our schools are safe?" I honestly don't remember if he asked. Because the answer would be that there's really nothing the schools can do to prevent psychopathic teenagers from blowing up the place. Actually, I'm sure the high school principals got together with the district administration to go over the protocol for a school emergency or some such thing, but in terms of preventing a terrorist attack on a school? If a kid wants to do it, he will figure out a way. Children are smart like that, psychopaths even smarter.

At the time, this was less clear, especially in the aftermath of Columbine, when — as Cullen's book shows in great detail — a lot of bad information was floating around and it looked for a little bit at least that the shooting/attempted demolition of the school was a twisted response to school bullying and that schools had to do more to get through to children to show them that murdering thirteen of their classmates and torturing dozens of others was clearly wrong. People expect a lot out of schools, and they should expect great things, in theory, but schools can't do much sometimes. In the pre-Columbine era of school safety they didn't prevent Columbine, and in the post-Columbine era I don't think they'd do much better. Encountering psychopaths is just dumb luck, and like the teacher I talked to explained, some of these kids are inevitably going to be psychopaths.

All this is to say, Dave Cullen's Columbine is harrowing, gripping, unrelentingly tear-jerking and brilliant.

Like I said, in general I'm really uninterested by stories about stuff like disturbed teenagers who intend to shoot and blow up schools, but Columbine is so well crafted and compelling that it sucks you in like few books I've ever read. I like the book club I'm in, and I've read every page of every book we've discussed for over five years now, but I have to say that a lot of time reading is somewhat of a chore. I usually default to the way things worked in college when I'd allot myself 30 or 50 pages a day, or devise some sort of regimen for getting through a book before a deadline. And then I usually cram reading into a point in the day when I have nothing else to do — on the subway, on a flight, on a train, at jury duty — whatever. I never sit on the sofa and read, and if I do, I usually fall asleep. With Columbine I finished it on the sofa while working on one hour of sleep, and just tore through it. So maybe I'm not so averse to reading more than I am averse to reading books that are a chore to read — if so, then good books are few and far between. Columbine is one of those books.

I'm still trying to unpack what makes Columbine so good, but here are a few places to start. One, I think it's hard to write about events that are inherently disturbing. It seems that In Cold Blood is usually the model for a book like this, and I read that relatively recently. Columbine is much better. Cullen talks about the day itself, which is blunt-force powerful writing, especially the final chapters when he reconstructs what eventually happened in the library, but he also does a lot in terms explaining the confusion afterward, the malfeasance on the part of the sheriff's office with the subsequent investigation, the inherent problem of memory, the media's negligence in reporting the story and the creation of misleading myths surrounding the day itself. And then he has this power of tugging at heartstrings in the worst way — and I mean that in the best way — that has your eyes welling up every ten or fifteen pages. My eyes are welling up right now and I'm not sure why other than because it's that powerful a book.

There are two things in particular that I took away from this book that are worth mentioning. One, as I mentioned briefly above, there is nothing you can do to stop a psychopath. You'll remember that there were two shooters — one was taller and, as the book shows, just a depressed kid who got mixed up with the wrong crowd in a big way. The other one was shorter and, as the book shows, was a complete fucking psychopath, like according-to-the-scientific-definition psychopath. The taller one might have eventually quietly killed himself. The shorter one was destined to do something destructive against mankind, and he succeeded mostly.

We sat around the other night with some folks and tried to figure out if school violence like this only happens in the suburbs. It sometimes seems that way, but I think that psychopaths exist everywhere. In the case of Columbine, the shorter shooter just had more room to grow as a psychopath. Perhaps a psychopath in the Bronx wouldn't have the space to assemble propane-filled bombs in his bedroom and test pipe bombs in a crowded city park, but they can figure out ways to get in trouble just the same. I don't think it's just the suburbs.

The second thing I took away from the book was that I think I finally understand how victims and victims' families can eventually "let go" of the hatred for the people who were the cause of their pain. I used to not understand how one got over it — or even forgave people — but Cullen's book keeps after the victims and victims' families and shows how the survivors and families move on. Hard to express, but there's something cathartic about reading about how the people move on — especially a few examples of the kids who survived getting shot — which if you read the book you'll see.

That said, Cullen also does a nice job in the afterword by giving the victims' families the opportunity to describe their grieving process — all the examples are different, but they all capture the questions and emotions you have as you read the book — he gets out of the way and the conclusions are that much stronger. The questions that one mother asks and the anger she still has — expressed in a rush over just a couple of pages — mirror all the questions that you've wanted answers to over the course of reading the book and all the anger you feel about why all this has happened. Answers are not forthcoming, and the anger will still be there, probably always there. Really really powerful stuff.

Something equally fascinating about the book is that Cullen fought to keep any pictures out of the book. It's rare that you see that, and I can't think of another example of a non-fiction book that eschews images. He says that he includes pictures on his website which you can look at. I haven't yet, but I will in just a minute. My memory of the shooters is their dumb yearbook pictures that were reprinted everywhere after the shooting. These images were in my head while I was reading Columbine, and as time goes on the two shooters just look really dumb, stuck in time, stuck in an era of bad combat boots, duster jackets (not trench coats) and terrible German industrial rock.

OK, I just spent a while looking at Dave Cullen's site. It's disturbing. He was right; the book is better without the pictures.

Cullen's writing style is generally terse and pitch perfect. One passage late in the book (pages 331-32) stands out for me. By this point you know that the shorter shooter is a full-fledged psychopath, so the passage doesn't exactly surprise you — it just fits with what you understand the shorter shooter's personality to be:

No time. Less than a month to go. Eric had a lot of shit left to do. He organized it into a list labeled "shit left to do." He had to figure out napalm, acquire more ammo, find a laser-aiming device, practice gear-ups, prepare final explosives, and determine the peak killing moment. One item was apparently not accomplished: "get laid."

The book is tragic, but not exploitative, and not overly fixated on the massacre itself. Some of the best parts deal with ways that we could do better — how the media could do better, how social services and schools can do better, how the authorities can do better. So in that sense, it's got a positive message. And the survivors stories are really inspiring. Cullen does a great job weaving in these stories alongside the timeline of the day itself, going back and forth in time and simultaneously pulling you in to the story and pulling you through it — or at least allowing you to see a little daylight along the way.

Things did change in big ways after Columbine — the response of SWAT teams to hostage situations and more apparent if you follow the news, a new "zero tolerance" approach to threats on schools. Psychopaths will always exist, and children will do unconscionably fucked up things, but there is a higher tolerance for school systems being more cautious — and that should probably deter some copycats. Now we seem to treat it like it's a security line at the airport in that you can't even joke about an explosive; hopefully that deters some of the situations.

The case of the taller shooter is more complicated than you'd think from your fuzzy memories of April 20, 1999. Like I said, it's not clear that he would have died that way had he not met the shorter shooter. One of the most frustrating things in the book is that just over two months before the shooting, the taller shooter turned in a creative writing assignment that disturbed his instructor enough that she got the school counselor and his parents involved; nothing happened; it was "just a story." I don't know that things are still that way.

The case of the shorter shooter — the psychopath — is both more and less disturbing. Less disturbing only in that there didn't seem to be a lot anyone could do to stop him, and more disturbing if you tease out what the logical end of that reality is.

It's really a good book; all week I've been thinking about it, and all five of us at book club last night (other folks had stuff to do) felt strongly about it. The story seems to have taken over Cullen's professional life, and he fucking nailed it in this book. Wow.

A Hardcover Book Is The Cornicello Charm Of A Celebrity's Career

Mike (The Situation) Sorrentino was at a Staten Island Barnes & Noble last night signing copies of his new 144-page book, Here's the Situation: A Guide to Creeping on Chicks, Avoiding Grenades, and Getting Your GTL on the Jersey Shore, published by a Penguin imprint:

He wrote the book, he says, the better to communicate with fans, and nostalgia led him to choose Staten Island as the kick-off for his book-signing tour.

"I was born here and have a life here," he said.

Sorrentino's fame monster is clearly growing. Between TV appearances, plans for a new clothing line, a vitamin line with GNC, the third-hottest-selling Halloween costume and other ventures, including a third season of "Jersey Shore," he is on tap to bring in at least $5 to $10 million this year.

This is when writing a book seems like a really silly thing to do.

The Washington Post's Celebritology 2.0 blog delves further into the text, and comes up with this:

But seriously, he has to have some kind words about women? Oh yes — on page 99, you'll see his "Women as Food" comparison. A Filet Mignon is the "hottest of the hot chicks" while Dry-aged (aka the Cougar Cut) has been "out in the salt air for some time" but still has a "nice depth of flavor."

We've seen all 22 episodes of Jersey Shore, and I have to say, The Sitch really started to grate on my nerves, particularly when his toxic personality flaws took over in the final episodes of the second season and he tried as hard as he could to prevent any of his roommates from having any fun at all at the club. The producers were lucky that Angelina provided such a stake-raising dramatic tension for as long as she was in the house, because when Sitch was left to his own devices, a really disturbing side of him began to emerge, and the season didn't end quickly enough.

I'm thinking in particular of the times when Sitch, having struck out with all of the really beautiful Miami women at a club, would sit by himself on the lounge's sofa and sulk. On "better" nights, he'd simply round up everyone and instruct them that it was "time to bounce." On worse nights, he'd hit on his roommates' prospective women partners while they were off using the restroom, then somehow justify a "robbery." The best example of the latter came when Vinny went off to use the bathroom and Sitch almost immediately flew in to try to rub up on Vinny's ladystory, arguing, unsuccessfully, that Vinny "f****d up" (to quote the show's subtitles) by leaving this woman unattended for three minutes. This attempted robbery was preceded by shots of Sitch glowering on the club couch, maddogging Vinny and the lady the whole time.

The Sitch's mind games tended to be fairly transparent, and it wasn't hard to see when he was being intentionally provocative — "grenades," "DTF" and the rest is just bluster that you kind of disregard. There's no need to self-righteously agonize over his "behavior" because it's not real — it's important to view it on a continuum somewhere between, say, The Roxbury Guys on one end and maybe GG Allin on the other end (but way down on the other end). This doesn't excuse the mass-marketing of misogyny (which is really something to take up with the producers telling the monkeys to dance and not the dancing monkeys themselves), but when you watch The Sitch enough, you start to question just how much is real and how much is mugging for MTV viewers. (I'll conveniently disregard this recent news story about Sorrentino's brother.) But at the end of season two, The Sitch's campy facade seemed to break down and he just seemed kind of psychologically fucked up. And that was what was really disturbing.

I know that the Real Worldy producers learned early on that having a television in the house was a show stopper, but I can't imagine sitting in one of those places all day just gazing at navels, even navels on midsections as ripped as The Sitch's.

Season two stood out to me in the way it reinvigorated the concept of the kitchen sink drama — I loved how they'd all start hollering at each other like they were acting a scene from a John Osborne play — and then the expressive Italian hands would start flying around and it was just brilliant. This played into The Sitch's game plan, as he was clearly the most self-aware and sociopathic of the group, and he tended to talk his way into drama almost as well as he talked everyone else out of drama. But it was weird how much pleasure he got fucking with his roommate's heads, like it was a debate tournament on steroids — some kind of gorilla juicehead chode grundle debate tournament. On steroids.

That said, the finale was a letdown — there was another big kitchen sink blowout, which was cool — hey, Jimmy's hectoring Alison and he tells her that he wishes she could have a miscarriage, just to know the meaning of pain! But then the roommates just kind of make up and have a fairly uneventful last night together in the Miami house. To paraphrase Angelina in the show's opening sequence, "Um, hello!?"

At first I was bummed, but then I thought about it and, jeez, it's kind of brilliant when you think about it, because it's exactly like the end of Look Back in Anger when Jimmy and Alison make up for no good reason and you get the sense that the whole thing is going to repeat itself, just some other day and not on this particular night. On this particular night we go back to playing squirrels and bears; The Sitch obsequiously kisses Snooki on the forehead before throwing her over his shoulder as he tells her that "they're all family" or some such thing that you know he doesn't believe. And back inside they all sort of make up. And for at least that night there's no more drama and hollering, but just like some kind of fucked up family, you know they'll be at each other's throats in the first episode of season three. It's not "kind of brilliant" — it's actually brilliant! Very existential!

At the time, however, here's how I wanted the show to end: One, the producers should have taken out all the furniture and decorations in that living room area, leaving only that hulking rec room sectional sofa; Two, no overdubbed music here — let the voices be their own music; Three, this allows the roommates, who over the course of the season have shown themselves to be relatively sane — or at least not so psychologically fucked up — to stage an intervention on the last night in which each takes The Sitch to task for being psychologically abusive and just kind of weird and generally damaged; Four, The Sitch not so slowly breaks down and starts to cry, beating his breast and bellowing something along the lines of "I know, I know — I just have so much unresolved anger and pain"; Five, the credits roll on a black background with no music — just like on the series finale of The Sopranos. I would have cried, literally cried.

The best part about The Sitch is really his "Sitch-guage" language, with all the snappy "GTLs" and "grenades" and whatever other goofy vocabulary that you know he labored over trying to get just right (there's nothing off the cuff about this guy — even his arguments seemed rehearsed — unlike Pauly D, who can screeeeam!). Most of the stuff he came up with sort of flew out of my mental space already — and not for lack of trying, believe me, but just because it just doesn't seem like The Sitch really commits to most of the stuff he comes up with. I don't know if he popularized "creeping" or if the first time I heard it was when Ronnie accused him of creeping almost immediately after Snooki was punched by that one dude in season one, but I like that word, too.

That said, I think most of what The Sitch comes up with is only half baked. The "grenade" concept sounds like a bastardization of something I heard former baseball player Mark Grace say about "jumping on the grenade" — which was a version of The Sitch's "grenade" only adapted to the world of baseball superstitions in which, according to Gracie, a player would basically "jump on a grenade" in order to stop a team's losing streak (see "slumpbuster"). I understand the concept of "jumping on the grenade" where I guess you "take one for the team" in order to get your buddy laid, but how often did this actually happen on Jersey Shore? (And we shouldn't have to add that this terminology is totally offensive while the country is still at war and there are people who literally jump on grenades to save fellow soldiers.) It seemed like there were often, uh, situations when there were only grenades, and to me that's when The Sitch's Sitch-guage breaks down. Or "evolves" I guess . . . whatever, I was still confused most of the time.

Which is to say, I think The Sitch could streamline his message somewhat. This might seem like an odd thing to suggest to someone who has only written a 144-page book, but I think his message can be a little convoluted. That and The Sitch's monomaniacal pursuit of non-incendiary women sort of misses what I see as his sense of justice and morality (no, seriously — it's there, it's just that he hides it most of the time). And he seems like such a good cook! Why couldn't he have done a cookbook?

If I were to have worked with The Sitch on his 144-page debut, I would have probably first lobbied to change the title from Here's the Situation: A Guide to Creeping on Chicks, Avoiding Grenades, and Getting Your GTL on the Jersey Shore to something a little more direct. Say, Guys Just Want To Stick Their Dick In Stuff.

Yes, it goes "off message" somewhat, but we don't want a rehashed Greatest Hits Of Sitch but rather something more like Sitch As The Conduit To Understand Deeper Truths About The Male Psyche. The Sitch was all about just wanting to put his dick into things, and he seems like the perfect spokesperson for the concept.

Consider — sticking one's dick into stuff is a time-honored tradition in literature, especially American literature: Moby Dick's harpoon, Walt Whitman dry humping ferry passengers, seven-eighths of Tropic of Cancer, the liver in Portnoy's Complaint, the pie in American Pie. Even the burrito in Mötley Crüe's The Dirt . . . male protagonists are always sticking, sticking, sticking!

Consider also — the book-buying public needs — demands! — another self-help book that translates the namby-pambyness of He's Just Not That Into You into something that the book-buying public can really understand: Guys just want to stick their dicks in stuff — not "like to" or "prefer to" or "if druthers were had, would be sticking" but rather that the urge, whether acted upon or suppressed, is the modus operandi for male behavior, and the prime explanation for interpreting male-female interactions. And once the world accepts this idea, we are free to understand it, accept it, overcome it — whatever.

And The Sitch is the person we need to communicate this concept.

If I were working with The Sitch, I'd be like, hey, The Sitch, get your thesaurus ready, because this is going to be big. I'd talk to Penguin and be like, hey, Gotham Books, A Penguin Imprint, think about it — whether it's a "grenade" or a water-rich fruit, the dirty little secret is that guys just want to stick their dick in stuff and maybe they'd be like, "you mean guys just want to stick their dicks in stuff?" and I'd be like no, no, no — there's just one dick that all guys want to stick in stuff, and they'd be like, "wow, that's pretty deep" and I'd hit The Sitch on the shoulder and be all like, no way man, you're telling me — have you ever watched Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1981 film Quest For Fire? Well have you?

And so on.

And I wouldn't roll The Sitch's book out in some Barnes & Noble on Staten Island. No, I'd have him roll into Times Square on the back of an elephant. Because, again, it's just that big. And maybe we could concoct a scene where JWoww shoots a tranquilizer dart at the elephant, and The Sitch falls to the pavement, and JWoww just sits there with that modern day Mona Lisa smirk looking awesome, because, well, have you ever actually considered how cool JWoww's smirk is? It is. But then that would be JWoww's book, and that's yet another one that we still have to do.

I want to say something quippy and brilliant here but I think I should save it for the foreward.

You with me, dawg?