Friends, what you are about to read is a true story. I know it’s true because I lived it, and also because nobody could make this up and maintain their dignity simultaneously, and I have precious little dignity left to protect.
It started with a wisdom tooth surgery. My mother and my aunt, two women who between them have approximately four decades of experience confidently sharing information they heard from someone at the local Dollar General, recommended a dental clinic.
“They’re wonderful,” said my mother, with the complete authority of someone who has not personally had her wisdom teeth removed there. I later discovered, AFTER the surgery, that The Dental Clinic That Shall Not Be Named has been sued for malpractice hundreds of times. This is the kind of information that is freely available on the internet, which I could have checked at any point before allowing strangers to remove my wisdom teeth based on a tip from two women whose primary intelligence network is the checkout line at Dollar General.
In between these exciting bathroom excursions, I have been drinking Tropical Fantasia, which is a beverage produced by either an unknown South American bottling operation or possibly the Russian guy who owns this motel. It tastes like someone visited the United States once, had half a Dr. Pepper at a rest stop in Oklahoma, flew home, and described the experience to someone in Mexico who made a knockoff and called it Señor Jalapeño. But with mangos. And grapefruit. It cannot overpower the taste of this surgery. Nothing can.
So to keep my mind occupied, I did what any reasonable man does when he is in enormous pain and trapped in a motel room that may or may not have a roach situation: I worked on software. Specifically, I fired up Vidiot, which is a tool I coded myself that converts Substack articles into narrated AI-generated videos, because the Wise Wolf is nothing if not a man who will debug Python in a medical haze rather than simply lie there suffering like a normal person.
The result is a video. About how to succeed on Substack. Made by a man who at the time of production was running on zero sleep, Tropical Fantasia, and pure spite.
Is it good? I genuinely cannot tell you. My critical faculties were occupied with other things, namely not dying.
But it exists. Which is more than I can say for my appetite, my sleep schedule, my faith in the Dollar General intelligence network, and my seven thousand dollars.
Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.
If you enjoyed this video, which was slopped together by a man running on Novocain withdrawal and Tropical Fantasia using a tool he built himself and named Vidiot because it makes videos and he is an idiot, then boy oh boy do we have a YouTube channel for you.
There are HUNDREDS of videos on there just like this one, and the reason there are hundreds of videos just like this one is that Lily has made an editorial decision that YouTube does not matter, which means she cannot stop me from making them, which means I have been making them completely unsupervised for an embarrassingly long time. We have maybe eleven subscribers over there. Possibly twelve if my aunt finally figured out how to make a Google account. The point is there is absolutely nothing at stake on our YouTube channel and I have treated it accordingly. Go gorge yourself. It’s all there. Nobody is stopping you. Certainly not Lily.
