When I make out my holiday guest list, I will put that old knucklehead Kirk Jones on the top.

Kirky, if you have forgotten, was the body surfer who went over the 180-foot Niagara Falls on Oct. 20 without a barrel. Not even a life vest.

In case you missed it, Kirk, 40, of Canton, Mich., announced this week that he is now penning a book on his misadventures tentatively titled “You’re Kidding Me: A Knucklehead’s Guide to Surviving Niagara Falls.”

That goes right on my Amazon.com list.

Face it. Part of the holiday ritual is listening to the same stories from the same people around the same table. If I hear Frank Renew’s story about getting elected high school class president one more time, I may boycott his hot crab appetizer. Who really cares what your nieces and nephews have accomplished in the past year?

Think of Kirk at the table.

First of all, you fill his glass with his favorite adult beverage, vodka and Coke. Hey, he is an adventurer, not a gourmet! Then everyone leans forward and asks, in unison, “What in the hell were you thinking?”

To celebrate 20 years of nonwedded bliss in June, Blue Eyes and I made the pilgrimage to Niagara Falls (her idea, naturally) and stayed at a great hotel overlooking the falls, listening to that roar all night. (I could snore and get away with it.) All I knew about Niagara Falls came from Marilyn Monroe in her blowzy classic “Niagara” with Richard Widmark.

No trip to the falls is complete without a trip to the base of the falls aboard the Maid of the Mist. The power of the falls is unimaginable. The river has eroded miles and miles over the years and actually moves the falls back from its original site. That is power. We sat at the top of the Canadian falls and laughed at the idea that anyone, in a barrel or not, would ever attempt to go over.

Annie Edson Taylor was the first. She did the falls in a barrel with her cat in 1901. That started it all. I can’t imagine who keeps the records but 13 people have done it since Annie and her cat. Roger Woodward, 7, made it over without a life vest after he fell out of a boat. (Who takes a boat anywhere near the falls?)

Jimmy Joyce has a bad feeling about our boy Kirk. Jones sits at the desk of the Niagara County coroner. Joyce gets to pull an average of 25 swollen and battered bodies out of the river each year. Joyce estimates a like number go over the falls and never are found. He told the Niagara Falls Reporter that “Every young kid with alcohol and testosterone flowing through his veins is going to think, if that 40-year-old guy can make it, why the heck can’t I?”

Joyce is expecting a lot more business.

It came as no surprise to the Jones clan that Kirk went over the falls. He was talking about it for weeks, undoubtedly after a few vodka and Cokes.

“He said he always thought there was a spot you could jump and survive,” matriarch Doris Jones, 77, told The Associated Press. “We never agreed to it. We thought it was risky.”

Risky.

The patriarch of the clan, Raymond Jones, said that Kirk wasn’t depressed. “I just thought he was grumpy.”

Grumpy.

He had reason to be grumpy. He is out of work, was fined five times in nine years for neglecting to obtain a driver’s license, hasn’t had a girlfriend for 20 years, and his best friend, the one who drove him to the river? He forgot film for the camera. Otherwise you would be seeing Kirk on “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” I would guess that his video would win the $10,000 prize on the show. Who could top it?

No less a social observer than Alice Cooper has proclaimed Jones “a real American hero. There is something so rock ‘n’ roll about what he did.”

I want to invite Kirk Jones over for holiday dinner and ask him if he did it for the rush, for the fame or just to kill himself. Anything would be better than Frank Renew’s high school stories.

More turkey, knucklehead? More vodka and Coke?

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.