Don't you hate it when people bother you about shit that doesn't matter? My mom sends me this little notice saying maybe I should be taking in more iodine. It's good for my thyroid.

Firstly, my thyroid is fine. I'll start worrying when I get a goiter or something. Is that even what happens; or is that the pituitary? See - it doesn't matter, because if I woke up without the fucker tomorrow, I wouldn't even know.

Secondly, I've had plenty of iodine in my day. I'm old enough that when I was a kid, people put iodine drops on your fucking scrapes. God, it was like being branded. The pain from iodine was all the encouragement a kid needed to wear skateboard pads. Furthermore, I used it to sterilize water on many a long-term backpacking trip. You'd put a few drops in a bottle of stream water, let it sit in the sun for a few hours, and wa-la; no micro-organisms would be waiting in your water to give you a two-week long bout of the shits. The downside to that is that iodine tastes like 80 different kinds of ass.

Thirdly, before iodine deficiency rots my thyroid away (to some unknown/not-cared-about consequence) I'm sure I will have drank my liver into oblivion, smoked my lungs blacker than tar, been hit by a drunk driver, had my body devoured by some form of cancer, been shot by a lunatic, and maybe - maybe - eaten by a shark. I don't know what the top ten killers in America are, but I bet none of them is a crapped out thyroid.

So Ma, I appreciate the concern, but my dick is going to fall off from beating it too much before my thyroid shits out because I'm not eating enough iodine.

Shank out.