A Snot Monster Ate My Brain

Wondering where the Wise Wolf has been for two and a half weeks? Ask the robot that flushed two weeks of notes down the toilet while I laid in bed puking with the super plague...

I am DEFINITELY not cheesing Futurama to make this thumbnail so don’t sue me Disney. (I am assuming Disney owns Futurama because Disney owns everything at this point except my soul and I figure their lawyers are already drawing up the paperwork on that.)

For roughly the last 18 days I have been too sick to function at even the most basic level of typical Wise Wolf intelligence (also known as stupidity). I have not been able to work because writing is actual work and thinking is HARD. It gets even harder when your lungs sound like the creaking old oak front door of a spooky Scooby Doo mansion. Every breath I take is a 200 year old door slowly creeeeaking open right before the gang splits up to look for clues. I could understand this if I still smoked ciggies but I kicked that habit years ago and I would like to know where a man goes to file a complaint.

God, where am I even headed with this? Getting lost in thought like that is actually useful for the point I am trying to make. Writing is hard when you can’t even think well enough to put together a Substack note that makes sense. This note has taken me 30 freaking minutes to write so far. That is THIRTY MINUTES for a handful of paragraphs from a guy who writes depressing fear porn for a living.

The 20 Dollar Robot That Flushed Two Weeks of My Life

Lily has Lily stuff going on right now so I haven’t been able to get her to pick up the slack while I am out. She did ask me why I wasn’t using this time to do research and map out articles that I could write later when I am feeling better. It was a perfectly reasonable question and the answer is that I tried and I tried HARD. I had two solid weeks of notes to show for it and then I personally destroyed every last one of them.

Let me explain. The whole mess started at the grocery store where I ran into a guy I know in real life and got a full tour of his brand new AI powered voice note transcriber. You wear the thing and talk at it and it types up whatever you said. It also cost two thousand dollars and he got that number into the conversation early and then worked it in again a few minutes later in case it had not landed the first time. The new iPhone came out of his pocket for no reason I was ever able to determine and the gold diamond ring on his hand was being held at an angle where a man could not possibly miss it. None of this was ever about the gadget. The message was that he is doing better than I am and that he got there by picking the right father. His dad owned a car dealership and he inherited the entire operation in his 20s when his father passed away. He has been calling himself a ‘self made man’ ever since (the self who made him being his dad) and he gets all of it in front of me every single time we run into each other because he is STILL mad that I slept with his prom date more than twenty years ago.

(Sir, you were handed a car dealership and you are wearing a ring that can be seen from orbit so maybe let it go already lol.)

The reason that run-in matters is that I went home from the store deciding I could build the same gadget myself out of spare parts and spite. His took two grand of daddy’s money. Mine was going to take my brains and whatever was in the junk drawer. So I frankensteined one together out of a 12 dollar Teensy microcontroller (think of a computer that shrank in the wash) and a broken microphone that I soldered onto the board myself. You talk at it and it types up whatever you said. The whole thing is junk electronics and by every known law of science it should NOT work because the man who built it is an idiot.

Except the dumb thing WORKED!

Flat on my back with a creaking chest and nothing to do but stare at a screen I talked at my twenty dollars of garbage for two weeks straight and it typed up close to a dozen pages of notes on every article I wanted to write once I could sit upright again. The rich guy with the ring paid two thousand dollars for the same trick and I had pulled it off for one percent of his price with parts I already owned. For about two weeks there I was very pleased with myself.

Sadly the same idiot who built the hardware also wrote the software and he did not do nearly as good a job on that end. Somewhere in my code I apparently decided that 10,000 lines of notes was the ‘maximum’ and that once the machine hit that number it needed to ‘flush’ the old notes to make room for the new ones.

I do mean flush in the toilet sense.

So in plain English my dumb ass programmed my own invention to delete every note I had taken and that is exactly what it did the second I crossed the line I had set for it myself.

Two weeks of work went down the pipes and all I really proved is that I can beat a rich man’s gadget on price and then lose to my own code. The point I was trying to make before a prom date and a soldering iron got involved is that WRITING IS REALLY HARD TO DO WHEN YOU ARE SICK.

Ten Percent of a Wolf Is Just a Dog

So there is no triumphant comeback article this week because everything I promised myself I would write no longer exists anywhere outside of my swiss cheese memory. The Wise Wolf will return to his normal bevy of depressing fear porn as soon as he is physically capable of taking a breath without feeling like there is a snot monster living inside of his lungs.

I swear whatever bug I have is eating holes in my brain because I cannot think. That THIRTY MINUTES I was complaining about up at the top turned out to be hour one. I have been sitting here working on whatever this is for roughly six hours now and the only skill I have sharpened in that time is underestimating how long it takes me to finish a paragraph. I am running at maybe 10 percent of normal wolf brain capacity and wolves are already kind of dumb to begin with. Ten percent of one rounds down to a dog and not one of the smart dogs either. Judging by the noise coming out of my chest I am currently the dog from the haunted mansion cartoon who eats a six foot sandwich while everybody else solves the mystery. If you asked me what I was talking about in the first paragraph I would not be able to answer the question (I scrolled up and read it and now I have questions for the man who wrote it). That is how bad my memory is right now.

I DO remember what the point of this article was though and that is only because the note I dictated for it is the one that put me past 10,000 lines in my slopped together note machine. The article you are reading right now is built out of that note and that makes this very thing the murder weapon. Two solid weeks of real work that I took down so we could get back to our regular writing schedule got flushed to make room for a sick man complaining about a creaking door (irony is ironic lol).

I am still sick but I am starting to feel a little better. The Lily stuff I mentioned up at the top is a 60 hour a week waitress job.

She is pulling those hours to get the money together for a car she desperately needs because riding the public bus is scary for a pretty young blonde woman.

(She says hello and she wishes she could help more.)

Five Years of Television in 20 Days

Those dozen pages the robot ate all came from the one activity I have been physically capable of since this thing knocked me down. I have been watching a lot of television and movies and documentaries. I have watched more media in the last 20 odd days than I have in the last five years combined. I haven’t been able to sleep more than two or three hours a night during this entire period so it has been nonstop video with a sick man mumbling article ideas at a homemade AI secretary in the dark.

What I have NOT been watching is the news. That is how a man who gets paid to pay attention managed to miss Russell Brand getting ten and a half years in prison for rape and sexual assault.

My head almost exploded when I found out!

That is a big deal and it is so messed up that I just had to mention it. I am going to write an article about it and my thoughts on it once I am back to my regular level of intelligence (above average but not that smart). The only reason I heard about it at all is that a friend called me up to tell me.

Otherwise I would still just be binge watching my new favorite YouTuber. He goes by Despot of Antrim and he makes video essays exposing the woke death cult insanity that has basically destroyed every beloved franchise like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings in the last ten years. A good chunk of the notes that died in the flush were about the stuff he covers and I am going to write those articles anyway as soon as I can hold a thought for longer than one creak of the door. I forgot what else I had planned on mentioning here other than the fact that being sick sucks.

A Hobojournalist Needs a Real Doctor

I guess you could consider this an ‘article’ and I am sorry if it isn’t up to my normal standards. I feel bad and I mean REALLY bad. It is the kind of bad where a man starts thinking he needs to figure out how to get health insurance because he might be dying.

We have also had a lot of people cancel over the last few weeks because I haven’t been putting out anywhere near as much content as we normally do. I apologize for that and there is nothing I can do about it right now. What I CAN do is stop charging you for the stuff I already wrote.

So the entire paid archive is OPEN. Free subscribers, brand new subscribers, people who have never given us a dime, everybody gets in. There are literally hundreds of articles back there that normally sit behind the paywall and every one of them is unlocked until I am healthy enough to get back on our regular schedule. Go read the old stuff while the new stuff is stuck inside a broken wolf.

Visit thewisewolf.club/archive.

The other thing we are doing is looking for some new writers who might want to join us for guest posts now and then. That way we will have a bunch of articles set to publish the next time the Wise Wolf turns out to be real people doing real people stuff in the real world. If you would like to be one of those writers you can shoot an email off to admin@wisewolfmedia.net and Lily or I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Now for the part where I normally ask you for money.

Feel free to skip it. (I am starting to sound like a beggar.)

Two trips to a walk in clinic ran me 500 freaking dollars in cash and I am a poor hobojournalist in dire need of insurance so I can see real doctors who don’t operate on a cash only basis. That place only takes cash and it makes me kind of curious whether it is even ‘legit’ (a doctor’s office that only takes cash is either very old fashioned or very wanted by somebody). It was all I had access to though so it is what I used. Ugh, I am blabbermouthing and I am sorry.

The rest of it goes to Lily and that car. She is fresh out of college and working 60 hour waitress weeks so she can buy her first one herself in cash without a loan from the bank. Lily is seriously awesome for wanting to do it that way. She is following my example like the daughter I never had lol.

So if you want to help us then please consider upgrading to paid. It comes to a dollar a month or whatever 80 percent off a year turns out to be and I can’t give you the exact figure because math is thinking and we have already been over where I stand on thinking. If you cannot afford that then at least consider sharing this article because every share brings the snot monster one step closer to eviction.

Thanks so much for sticking it out with us.

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For the rest of the year, you can upgrade to paid for 80% off the regular rate. This works out to be a couple dollars a month. Maybe? I don’t really know I am too sick to check right now.

I am going to lay back down.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

Final Note: Anything in this article that did not make sense was brought to you by the two weeks I have spent drinking Nyquil like it is water. The bottle does say not to operate heavy machinery and I would argue a Substack counts.