https://youtu.be/j-tzUrhcv8w
P.J. Washington had seventeen points in the first quarter of this game. Actually, to be more specific, he had seventeen points in the final six minutes of the first quarter of this game. During that brief stretch of time, he was hitting threes like prime Klay Thompson and looked completely unstoppable. I wasn’t watching this game while this was happening, but I did happen to take a peek at the box-score in progress, and you can guess what happened when I did that.
Yep. Hype overload.
When my BHL (blood-hype level) spikes, I experience a lot of symptoms. Usually it starts with a bit of tingling in my extremities. My vision will start to swim. As the hype compounds upon itself, not only do my thoughts start to get more erratic (at one point I told my cat that Peej was going to break Kobe’s 81 with no problem [he meowed at me like he knew I was being irrational]), but my symptoms worsen. Entire limbs will go numb. I’ll be sweating buckets. My toenails fall off. And, of course, I’ll run around my apartment with a permanent marker, scrawling Hornets logos on every piece of Bucks paraphernalia that I own.
And, just between you and me, I had a “something” that lasted for more than four hours.
When it became clear that Washington wasn’t going to break Kobe’s record, and wasn’t even going to score fifty, or even thirty, that’s when it all came crashing down. An elevated BHL is uncomfortable but ultimately harmless; the real problem is when that hype level crashes rather than being allowed to lower itself naturally. I crashed, and the results were bad.
The paramedics told me that I was brain-dead for five hours. They also told me that they didn’t know who called the ambulance for me since I live alone. I tried to tell them that my kitty Japurri Purrker knows how to use the phone to dial 911, but they didn’t believe me. They probably thought that being brain-dead for five hours had impacted my ability to use my brain for thinking purposes. Well, joke’s on them, because my brain still works really well, well enough to send a sternly-worded message to Mr. Washington himself: if you’re gonna score seventeen points in six minutes, you gotta at least score thirty for the game, you dumb-dumb.