While my wife was home dealing with the mother of all poopy diapers and a crying baby who refused to sleep, I was in Brooklyn taking pictures of a bare butthole and a naked vagina with a pen inserted into it. As I looked long and hard into another woman’s love canal I decided it was time to try something new. It was time for The Furburger Method.

By the time I found myself alone with porn star Joanna Angel of “Burningangel.com”, I had been up for four days straight. A week or so earlier my kid decided he no longer needed sleep and therefore neither did we.

Before long my wife and I were reduced to zombies and not fun, adventurous, outgoing zombies who socialize like in the movies but rather dull and distant zombies, like old-people zombies. My birthday dinner Friday night consisted of the two of us having a staring contest across a restaurant table. We both lost. Or won depending on how you look at it. My wife, irritated, said, “Why are these people behind us talking so loud in my ear?” “They’re not,” I told her, “We’re just not saying a word and so you can hear them.”

When we got home our baby was still crying and awake. For weeks he’d been fussy, we assumed he was teething. We assumed that because we are first-time parents who instead of being uninformed are over-informed. We have a stack of parenting books, each one contradicting the other. Even so far as to shit-talk the other guy.

“Never let your kid cry. EVER! If he starts to look like he’s thinking he’s going to cry STOP HIM! He must not cry.” What? Is gonna melt?

Then the next guy is like ” HE MUST CRY IT OUT! DONT PICK HIM UP UNTIL HE STOPS HIS CRYING! EVEN IF IT TAKES 18 YEARS! HE MUST CRY!”

Another guy is on the fence, “Let them cry a little but not for long and then go stop their crying, then put them down and let them cry some more.”

It’s like The 3 Little Pigs! People want to blame television for kids sucking but I blame the makers of the parenting books. Kids start off on the wrong foot and fall down hill form there.

And yet it was a book that saved our lives. In 1985 Dr. Richard Furburger published Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems. It basically said our baby wasn’t broken, we’re just stupid. And having them sleep in bed with us while we drink wine and watch 30 Rock on Netflix and laughing at how he dances when the theme song comes on is not just wrong it’s retarded. Lonnie retarded. The gist of it is that you have to reteach the small human how to sleep. It sucks. They cry. Not a little. And not for a short while. But for hours, deep, sad, heartbreaking wails. The first night is THE SUCK. And all we can do is go in every 5, 10, then 20 minutes, check on him, make sure he’s not dead and that he’s still crying. Alive? Check. Still crying? Check check.

I don’t know science so I can’t explain the dark voodoo magic that scientists perform and I sure as shit can’t really explain why the 2nd night my dude slept 7 hours, then 12 hours straight through the night the 3rd day and consistently 13 hours a night since. All I can tell you is that cavemen raised good law-abiding Americans without any books and so can you. Except when they won’t sleep. You need this book. Furburger. Remember the name.

CHRIS NIERATKO

(For more stupid go to Chrisnieratko.com)