Dawn Sitler drove from Fort Hood, Tex., to Seaside Heights to pose for a photo in front of the garage door featured in each episode of the show.

“It’s where we want to come back to and party,” said the 42-year-old former New Jersey resident. “I partied hard when I was younger. Watching them reminds me of the younger days 20 years ago. This is a good place to come to have fun.”

Not everyone loves “Jersey Shore.” Italian-American groups say it perpetuates negative stereotypes of Italians, and gives the region a bad image — even though only one of the cast members, Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola, is actually from New Jersey.

But love it or hate it, the show has created a buzz that put Seaside Heights on the worldwide map. With a name like Maria Maruca, the head of the borough’s tourism office could be a cast member. She thought it was freakin’ awesome when the show fist-pumped nearly $3 million into the local economy during its first season last year.

“I’m pumpin’ my fist, got my pouf on and everything,” she said. “This is national publicity you can’t even put a dollar amount on. There’s an even bigger buzz this year.”

Some quick indications: beach badge sales are up significantly this year. Several new businesses opened on or near the boardwalk in the area of the “Jersey Shore” beach house explicitly to capitalize on the expected crush of show workers and gawkers.

So you wanna live the GTL (gym-tan-laundry) lifestyle yourself, huh? For the true experience (and a lot of dough), you can rent the actual house where the cast members stayed at 1209 Ocean Terrace, near Kearney Avenue. But it has to be during the week; weekends are booked through the end of the summer. It rents for $1,800 to $6,000 a night (duck phone included), depending on the date, said Michael Loundy, the real estate agent whose firm Seaside Realty brought MTV to the shore last summer. Visit http://seaside-realty.com for a virtual tour of the house, and to inquire about renting it.

Be prepared to have a bunch of mooks hanging around the garage door at all hours, though. On weekends, as many as 400 people a day have been known to pose for pictures there.

“We have to re-paint it four to five times a week because people come up and write so much graffiti on it,” Loundy said. “It can get nuts.”

Last year, while the show was being shot, the cast members were unknowns who largely stayed under the radar. This year, however, they’re some of the best-known faces in America — and prime targets for anyone hoping to provoke a clash and maybe get him or herself on TV.

Seaside Heights Police Chief Tom Boyd said there will be 20 police officers each weekend on and near the set, with an additional 20 MTV security personnel — a tenfold increase from last year.

“I truly expect no problems this year,” he said. “When people start drinking and want to be John Wayne, that’s when you get concerned. All we need to do is take care of the John Waynes. And we will.”

No “Jersey Shore” tour is complete without a stop at the Beachcomber Bar & Grill (boardwalk and Dupont Avenue). That’s where Snooki was decked by a sucker-punch from a rowdy bar customer in season one. The scene, which aired in promos but was cut from the actual show, is immortalized inside the bar. It sells T-shirts featuring a chalk outline of a woman sprawled on the ground, surrounded by crime-scene tape and the words “Snooki Was Here!”

“One day I was talking to my brother-in-law (Boyd, the police chief), and a girl is lying on the floor of the bar and another girl is taking pictures of her,” said the bar owner, Michael Carbone. “He said, ‘What are they doing?’ I said, ‘They’re imitating Snooki.’ “

On the boardwalk directly behind the “Jersey Shore” house is “The Shore Store,” the bawdy T-shirt shop where cast members were employed when they weren’t exercising, tanning, doing laundry or having sex. Most of the T-shirt slogans can’t be described here; some of the tamer ones include “I’ll Take The Grenade” (a reference to the show’s term for a difficult woman); “Fist-Pumpin’ Like Champs,” “I Started The Friggin’ Pouf,” and “Good Girls Go To Heaven; Bad Girls Go To Jersey.”

Bone-thumping nightclubs feature heavily in the show, and in the real-life nightlife of Seaside Heights. Karma (Hamilton Avenue and Boulevard) is where Snooki did her panties-baring backflips. The Bamboo Bar (Lincoln Avenue and Boulevard) is where J-Woww got into a catfight with another woman. Other nightspots featured on the show include The Headliner (1401 Rt. 35 south in Neptune) and the Tropicana Casino and Resort in Atlantic City (Brighton Avenue and Boardwalk) which is offering a “Jersey Shore” package including a stay in the same suite the cast members stayed in, dinner at an Italian restaurant, tanning at a spa and laundry services on premises.

Hoping for an encounter with the many crew members (and the occasional cast member)? Try Capt. Hooks (Kearny Avenue and Boulevard); EJ’s, (boardwalk and Sheridan Avenue); or Riggers (Sumner Avenue and Boulevard). The crew stays at the Sea Garden Motel (Porter Avenue and Boulevard), among other places.

The “gym” component of gym-tan-laundry happens at Anytime Fitness in the A&P Shopping center (Route 35 south in the Ortley beach section of Toms River). Tans come free, courtesy of the sun, and the laundry is done at The Scrub Board (220 Boulevard at Franklin Avenue, Seaside Heights).

And of course, no “Jersey Shore” tour would be complete without high-frequency hair maintenance at Jagged Edge Hair Design (638 Fischer Blvd. in Toms River) where Pedro Marte dishes up blowouts, faux hawks and razor cuts (styling gel included, natch.)

Assuming that I must be missing something, I took a closer look at this phenomenon that answers to the name of “Snooki.” Imagine my delight in discovering that every single word out of Snooki’s mouth is rich with metaphor! Remember Peter Sellers’ simple-minded gardener, Chance, in the 1979 comedy “Being There,” whose statements (“As long as the roots are not severed, all is well”) were revealed to be cunning explorations of larger philosophical and socioeconomic themes? Snooki is just like that, but with bigger hair.

So cringe not, my friends, when you spot this woman’s enormous orange head on your TV screens. Instead, go forth and spread the word of Snooki!

Snookism: When I woke up, I was like, “What did I do last night? Like what did I do?” I fucked up. Story of my life.

Real meaning: Without the glow of nostalgia, our lives amount to little more than a series of pointless foibles. 

Snookism: My ultimate dream is to move to Jersey, find a nice, juiced, hot, tanned guy and live my life.

Real meaning: Lower your expectations and your dreams may come true.

Snookism: I am a princess at home, like, I am the fucking princess of fucking Poughkeepsie. Here, I am nobody. I’m, like, emotionally exhausted.

Real meaning: You can never go home again.

Snookism: Snooki’s stayin’ and I’m ready to party. I’m ready to meet sexy guidos and I’m ready just to fucking be single.

Real meaning: Seize the day or surrender your mortal flesh to the eternal abyss.

Snookism: Mike can be a nice guy. Like, he shows his good side then he shows his jerk-off side. That’s what I like: a good guy and a jerk off, it’s all in the same.

Real meaning: Be wary of the man who struggles to hide his inner darkness.

Snookism: Pickles is my thing.

Real meaning: Self-knowledge offers emancipation from the mundane.

Snookism: I look over and I see like hair being pulled and all this shit, I’m like, “Oh my God, how do I get in?”

Real meaning: Touching divinity is impossible without a blind leap into the unknown.

Snookism: I’m fat. I’m about to eat a sausage right now. Fuck you all! Ha ha!

Real meaning: No finer pleasure awaits us than to sup as night falls, heedless of the larger world outside.

Snookism: Um, I don’t read books. I tried to read “Twilight,” but it got boring the second page. There’s no pictures, so, I’m not readin’ it.

Real meaning: The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.

Snookism: My most prized possession would probably be my bronzer and eyeliner. Bronzer because, just in case you go out and then you look in the mirror and you look pale? Just apply the bronzer. You don’t have enough eyeliner on? Put the eyeliner on.

Real meaning: Assume a virtue if you have it not.

(Yes, Snooki was conjuring Shakespeare in those last two.)

“The Mollusk” was made between rounds of surf-fishing for bluefish and bass — both before and after the water pipes burst in their winter beach house/studio, leaving recording equipment adrift in an indoor flood. Naturally, the album sounds thoroughly soaked. This is Ween’s “wet” album, in much the same way that last year’s “12 Golden Country Greats” was their Nashville album. Songs like “The Golden Eel” and “Ocean Man” mine the water motif quite literally, while the hilarious title track and “Polka Dot Tail” take it one step further, the first by aping the dopey Brit-folk mysticism of Donovan’s “Atlantis” and the second by lumbering whimsically like “Yellow Submarine.” Other tracks, such as the opening ditty, “I’m Dancing in the Show Tonight,” are soaked in impressionism: The piano notes sprinkle lightly, the tuba plods like a foot through mud and the vocals warp as if they were accidentally thrown into the washing machine.

“The Mollusk” continues Ween’s career drift toward something consistently listenable — though characteristically eccentric — but also more playfully pop-centric than ever (cf the Residents). Though they’re good enough songwriters to play it straight and almost get away with it (“It’s Gonna Be” sounds pulled from the Peter Cetera songbook), the Ween boys are at their best on songs like “Mutilated Lips,” when they forage through the grotesque, the surreal, the outright nasty — anything that titillates their sick sense of humor. They’re still guys who get off on weird sounds (such as “Pink Eye’s” vacuum cleaner melody and dog-bark percussion) and wiener jokes (“Waving My Dick in the Wind”) — and the best thing about them is hearing how much fun they’re still having.