While I spend my days chronicling babies in microwaves and obsessing over failures, my five-years-older brother Wally is actually interested in making the world a better place—the business world, specifically, which is both the subject of and audience for his brand-new book, Full Contact Leadership.

From the Amazon website:

In today’s world, it is rare that leaders bring their hearts and souls into the office. Author Wally Schmader shares his most practical techniques on how you can use your “whole self ” to connect and understand people at all levels of an organization-the hallmark of a “Full Contact Leader.” Schmader helps you deepen your skill set, heighten your self-perception and lead with higher expectations. You will upgrade your “leadership vocabulary” and learn new ways of handling some of your most vexing leadership and management challenges.

Fuck yeah! My brother has been nothing but supportive of my stupid life as a performance artist journalist, and I shall be equally supportive of his life as an enlightened book-writing businessman. (If he managed to refrain from mocking my solo play about prank-calling hookers, I can have nothing to say about his will-to-power business book. Plus, of the dozens of people I’ve heard say “I’m gonna write a book” over the past two years, my brother’s one of the very few who actually did it.)

As for his leadership skills, I can attest that he did an effective and soulful job of leading me to my first booze (Coors), my first pornography (Hustler, ugh), my first fake ID (lost by some guy named Tony, who looked enough like both of us we passed it back and forth), and my first Elvis Costello record (Imperial Bedroom, Christmas 1982, on vinyl with that gorgeous wall-of-words lyric sheet.) Congratulations, Wally!