I sigh contentedly and lean back into the soft embrace of my desk chair, a chair whose sensual caress could never be matched by a woman. The editing process is complete for my video depicting the hundred best midrange jumpers of the 2019-20 NBA season, and it now eagerly consumes CPU cycles as it renders into a final MP4 file. Soon, my latest innovation in the basketball highlights sphere will be released to a worldwide audience who is not even aware that they yearn for such a thing.
As if to reward me for my diligent work, my kitty Japurri Purrker hops into my lap. There is a lap-sitting routine that we have come to a mutual understanding on: he will pad around on my lap for a few rotations, lightly digging his claws into my pants and purring while I scritch his back. Then he will settle into a comfortable position sitting compactly across my legs, staying still so that it is easy for me to scritch under his neck and around his ears. For up to the thirty minutes he will sit, purring loudly, until he either tires of resting on my bony legs, or I tire of his extra weight crushing me.
But this time, the protocol is ignored, and instead, he looks at me and meows. Glowing within the orange orbs of his eyes is a feisty intelligence which I trust more than any human advisor. The meaning of his gaze and his pointed meow couldn’t be more clear: he is accusing me of resting on my laurels, of becoming complacent in my quest to become the internet’s preeminent provider of NBA highlight videos.
“What do you want me to do, Japurri?” I whine, resenting the accusations levied upon me. In my mind, I have innovated to the absolute furthest reaches of cutting-edge highlights mastery; there is nowhere left to go. All depths have been plumbed, all summits have been reached. I can continue to delight my subscribers by rehashing the same overused concepts with my videos, and I can even surprise them with a never-before-seen compilation of one hundred midrange jumpshots, but there is a limit to every man’s creativity, and I have reached mine.
Suddenly, Japurri hops off my lap and trots to the kitchen. It is unlike Japurri to vacate my lap without receiving so much as one luxurious pet of his soft fur, but he returns quickly with a familiar foil pouch carried in his mouth like a vanquished critter. Pop-Tarts.
They are not microwaved, as I would prefer them, but Japurri has been well-trained not to jump on to the kitchen counters, which precludes him from accessing the counter where my microwave sits. I have no doubt that he could use his advanced intelligence to operate a standard household microwave and heat up my Pop-Tarts for the requisite fifteen seconds.
Japurri deftly returns to my lap and deposits the cold Pop-Tarts on my chest. Happy to have a snack, I remove one from the wrapping and begin to munch on it. I had been feeling somewhat tired and listless before, but the rush of sugar invigorates me. There is a feeling in my skull of disused neurons coming to life and excitedly firing electrical pulses through reactivated synapses. Japurri stares at me, not blinking, not meowing, not moving, as this happens. He knew what would happen before I even had an inkling of it.
“Hook shots!” I exclaim. “A forgotten, unheralded aspect of the nowadays NBA, a shot that is pushed under the rug by an autocratic NBA elite who wish to bring attention to flashier methods of scoring.” Overcome by creative impulses that are just being awakened from a period of dormancy, I rush to basketball-reference to assess the situation. There, I find that 2,448 hook shots have been made in the 2019-20 season. From those, the hundred best would be located, then compiled into a single video whose ability to entertain would be unmatched by any other NBA highlight video, official or unofficial.
Japurri sits down on my lap, his purring competing with the furious clack of my fingers on my keyboard. His eyes narrow with contentment as his master prepares to overturn the global highlights paradigm.