Reflecting Day: Brockway's Medical Clusterfuck! 🌭

We started Reflecting Day as a place for us, the 🌭s, to talk to you, the also 🌭s, about what was going on. Not just with the site, but with our lives. It was going to be the one time a month we didn’t have to be funny, and could instead focus on transparency and earnestness.

Of course we never once used it for that.

Instead we made Reflecting Day a place to announce changes to the site, to make jokes about jokes we weren’t allowed to make, or to repost articles daring people to sue us. Seanbaby and I just aren’t comfortable speaking honestly and openly about ourselves. When you give us that chance, we fall back on our default emotional crutch, which is 8,000 words about the time one of The Wiggles showed his dick. The last time I spoke with any of you honestly and openly, it was as a joke setup to getting lashed with a motorcycle chain before a mail-in wrestling final.

That’s… that’s the most perfect example of my emotional maturity I could possibly think of-

OooOOOoooh, and Brockway is down! Now, see, the key to a good chainin’ - you gotta go used for a dirtier swing, and obviously, Harley Davidson is still king of the Alabama Licorice Whip. Hello, folks, I’m Jim “The Human Tractor” Jumb and I’m here to-

No! Brockway! Damn it! Face this, you coward.

This will be the first Reflecting Day that actually works as intended. Here we go: I’m going to be stepping back from the site for a while. And that’s going to mean diminished content for you all. I’m having a lot of health problems, and they’ve been impacting the work for a while. Now they’re making it all but impossible.

A few years ago I came down with a mysterious tailbone pain, so I bought a standing desk and kept working. Then my knees went out for no apparent reason, so I bought an adjustable desk to switch between positions, and I kept working. Then my eyes gave out. I could hardly see. So I got on medication, I turned my monitor brightness all the way down, and I kept working. My right shoulder gave out, so I learned to mouse left-handed, and I kept working. My left shoulder gave out, then my entire upper back, spine and neck. I bought an iPad stand so I could work laying down. Then my hands started going numb. I get short of breath. I don’t… know how to work through that? Wait, voice control! I’ll do voice con- nope! Something inside has just given out. I don’t know what it is yet. I’m a big dude and I’m struggling to get down 1,000 calories a day. I’ve lost 15 pounds in the last month. I’m lightheaded and foggy.

I don’t know a workaround for my brain not functioning. But I’ll tell you what: If any of you are on the cusp of developing the necessary technology to shunt human consciousness into a robot body, I am your first volunteer. No questions. It doesn’t even have to be a good robot body. Scan me into a Roomba so I can get around, and tape a knife to it so I can win arguments. That’s all I ask.

Trust me: I’m doing everything I can for… all of it. It’s crazy to me that so many health problems would cascade out of nowhere, so I am both terrified that it might be, and desperately hope that it is one larger issue we can figure out soon. This week I have a call with a neurosurgeon, a followup with my eye doctor, then a colonoscopy and endoscopy -- same day! I’m gettin’ Fingercuffed by medical science and that better earn me some answers, or at least some sympathy from my writing partner:

The hours I can effectively work have dwindled away, and now I have medical appointments nearly every single day. I just can’t 🌭 properly right now. I’m going to try to stay on the podcasts, I’m still going to layout and program the site, and I’m going to do my best to keep up with our Teamworking Days. The rest of the time I’m going to run remasters of my old Cracked articles to replace my missed days. Don’t worry! I’ll be fixing those up, tweaking the language, punching up the jokes, and making new images as I’m able -- but that’s all I can do for the foreseeable future.

There’s so much good stuff that will still go on, uninterrupted. We have a few exciting guest posts coming up, Lydia has been killing it weekly, Brendan has been killing it monthly, and Seanbaby never stopped killing it. Frankly, it’s amazing that it won’t die. They have some amazing work in the pipeline, so I hope you’ll bear with us (me) through this temporary setback.

I know it’s not the schedule I promised you when we launched, and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to. I love this job, I love writing here, and I have an ever-expanding archive of madness I want to share with you -- it grows so much faster than I can get to it! I see now how Seanbaby wound up trapped in a hoarder-castle of pop culture garbage from impossible universes. I want to get back to work as soon as possible because this is a truly great place, and because I love doing it, but mostly because I can sense this fortress of insanity growing beyond control and I am terrified of the prison I cannot stop making for myself.