I Have Bronchitis Again and the World Is Ending, So That’s Fun

The Doc said, 'You have acute Bronchitis'. What the Hell is 'cute' about that?

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It is February. I know this because I am currently hacking up what I believe to be an entire lung, possibly two, while wrapped in every blanket I own like some kind of discount biblical shepherd who made terrible life choices. Which, now that I say it out loud, is not entirely inaccurate.

Every single year, without fail, winter finds me. Not in the romantic, snow-falling-gently-on-a-Hallmark-movie-set kind of way. In the “congratulations, your bronchial tubes have declared war on your body and there is nothing you can do about it except suffer” kind of way. Bronchitis. Again. Because apparently my immune system took one look at 2026 and said, “Nah, bro, you’re on your own.”

If you have never had bronchitis, let me describe the experience for you. Imagine someone replaced your chest cavity with a broken accordion filled with wet gravel. Now imagine that accordion is being played by an angry raccoon. At three in the morning. That’s bronchitis. You cough so hard your neighbors file noise complaints. You cough so hard you pull muscles in places you did not know you had muscles. You cough so hard that your dog looks at you with genuine concern, and dogs eat garbage for fun, so that’s really saying something.

And here’s the thing about being a freelance journalist with bronchitis. There is no “sick day.” There is no kindly HR department sending you a fruit basket and telling you to “take all the time you need.” There is just you, staring at your laptop through watery eyes, doing math that would make a grown accountant weep.

Let’s talk about that math. Electricity bill? Five hundred dollars. And that is with me actively trying NOT to use electricity, like I’m living in some kind of voluntary Amish experiment except I still need Wi-Fi because I have a Substack to run. Heating bill? Another five hundred bucks, give or take, depending on how much you enjoy the feeling of your fingers when they’re not blue. Rent? A thousand dollars a month, which in today’s America is considered “affordable,” which tells you everything you need to know about where we are as a civilization.

So if you’re keeping score at home, that is two thousand dollars a month just to exist in a box that is slightly warmer than outside. And I haven’t eaten yet. Or bought cough medicine. Or paid for the internet I need to do the job that earns the money that pays for the box.

This is the glamorous life of independent journalism, folks. This is what “following your calling” looks like. It looks like a guy in three sweaters doing long division on the back of an overdue bill and wondering if he can write off NyQuil as a business expense.

But you know what? The bills are actually the LEAST insane part of my life right now. And that is genuinely terrifying.

Because while I am over here wheezing like a broken squeaky toy, the entire country has apparently decided to speedrun the book of Revelation while I wasn’t looking.

The Epstein files. Let me just... let me just sit with that for a second. We now have actual documents, with actual names, detailing actual horrific things done by actual powerful people, and the national conversation about it lasted roughly as long as a TikTok video before everyone moved on to arguing about something else. Names of some of the most powerful people on the planet connected to what is arguably the most disturbing criminal conspiracy in modern history, and America collectively shrugged and went back to scrolling. I spent weeks covering this. We had the number one publication in the faith category on Substack because of it. And then I got bronchitis, because of course I did, because God apparently has a sense of timing that I would describe as “aggressive.”

And THEN. While I am lying in bed trying to remember what breathing without pain felt like. The White House starts talking about ALIENS. Just... openly. Casually. Like they’re discussing the weather. “Oh yes, non-human intelligence, very interesting stuff, anyway here’s the budget proposal.” I’M SORRY. WHAT. We just skipped right past “are we alone in the universe” and went straight to government officials talking about alien technology like it’s a policy issue. And NOBODY seems appropriately freaked out about this. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, except I can’t afford crazy pills because I spent all my money on heat.

And look, I try not to go full end-times preacher in every article. I really do. I have a whole Substack full of deep biblical scholarship and careful theological analysis. But can we just acknowledge, for one brief moment, that if you sat down with the book of Revelation and a newspaper from this week and put them side by side, you would need a stiff drink? The convergence of events right now reads less like coincidence and more like a checklist. I’m not going to belabor the point here because my head hurts too much to do a proper exegesis, but if you’ve been reading my work, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t been reading my work, maybe start. I’m just saying.

All I want. All I have EVER wanted. Is to live a normal, boring, regular life where the biggest drama is whether the pizza place got my order wrong. That’s it. That’s the dream. Instead, I am living through what appears to be the script of a Hollywood disaster movie that got rejected for being “too unrealistic.” I half expect to wake up tomorrow and see a headline that says “GIANT METEOR ALSO HAPPENING, PLUS VOLCANOES” and at this point I would just nod and make coffee.

What happened to normal? Remember normal? Remember when the news was boring? Remember when the president talked about infrastructure and you could just tune out and go about your day? Remember when the wildest conspiracy theory was whether Paul McCartney was secretly dead, and that was considered FRINGE? Now the government is confirming things that would have gotten you institutionalized five years ago, and we’re all just supposed to act like that’s fine. It’s not fine. None of this is fine. I am not fine. I have bronchitis.

So here’s the deal. I’m sick. My head feels like someone filled it with concrete and then hit it with a hammer. My chest sounds like a haunted house sound effects album. I am going to go back to bed and try to recover like a normal human being, which is ironic because nothing about anything is normal anymore.

I will get back to writing real articles as soon as humanly possible. If I can’t get something substantial out by tomorrow, I’m going to have Lily, my brilliant editor who is 22 and therefore has an immune system that actually functions, write something or I’ll pull a piece from the backburner that I’ve been sitting on. Either way, you’ll get content. It just might not be me personally screaming into the void for a day or two.

Here’s where I need your help. We dropped from number one in the faith category on Substack all the way down to number thirty-one. Thirty-one. Because momentum is everything on that platform, and when you get knocked out by bronchitis in the middle of your biggest series, the algorithm doesn’t send a get-well card. It just buries you.

So if this article made you laugh, or think, or feel slightly less alone in the feeling that the world has gone completely sideways, do me a favor. Share it. Send it to someone. Post it somewhere. And if you’ve been reading for free and you’ve been thinking about becoming a paid subscriber, now would be a really, really good time. We’re trying to climb back up the rankings while I’m trying to climb back up from my couch, and every single share and every single subscription makes a real difference.

Thank you for sticking with me. I’ll be back as soon as the raccoon in my chest decides to vacate the premises.

Grace and peace,

The Wise Wolf

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with a bottle of cough syrup and the entire book of Revelation. Again. Because that’s just my life now.

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