Metta World Peace Was Zonked Out On Painkillers After His Knee Surgery, And His Tweets Were Slightly Stranger Than They Usually Are [UPDATE: This Might Be Some Sort Of PR Stunt]

Update: This—part or all of it—is some sort of PR stunt, because in in this gilded age, even the most banal things are guerrilla marketing. A Deadspin staffer got this email yesterday, excerpted in part:

I wanted to see if you’re interested in this video of Metta World Peace with an interesting backstory.

Metta World Peace has befriended one of the execs at our CC Studies [sic] division (Comedy Central’s hub for all things digital), and when he was getting out of surgery this week he immediately sent over a video of himself coming off of the meds and being a little silly. CC Studios added some subtitles to make it even funnier. We think there’s a fun story here about how Metta has become friendly with CC Studios, and wants to work with us to create content – starting with this kind of wacky video of him in the hospital, and some other things we have coming up.

We’d love to have you post it, along with the backstory, as Metta tweets it out. He thinks this is really funny and is really keen to share it today, so let us know if you’re interested as soon as you can.

Bastards. I have trouble accepting that all of the tweets below were written in partnership with CC Studios (Comedy Central's hub for all things digital) but obviously the linked video was produced with some sort of weird corporate synergy in mind. I apologize for being Comedy Central's mark. I left the post below as is—feel free to use the discussion to debate which of Metta World Peace's tweets were subject to A/B testing.

Metta World Peace tore his meniscus on Monday and had surgery to repair it yesterday. When he awoke, he made his own version of the post-surgery hallucination video (think "Is this real life?" except it's Metta World Peace in the operating room, telling a nurse "I feel like you guys party back here"), and composed a bunch of tweets that answered the age-old question: What if a guy that usually acts like he's been dosed with a cocktail of extra-strength behavioral modification drugs was also actually on painkillers? It turns out Metta World Peace's hallucinations are mostly about wildlife and flowers, and when laid up, he will start a group rap with the opening line, "metta dub blowing like balloons." Sounds about right.

Apparently no one thought to keep the children away from him:

He signed off:

Four minutes later:

He watched his Yo Gabba Gabba cameo:

And then got philosophical (?) about the Lakers:

Yep, heavily tranquilized Metta World Peace runs an oddball, fan-interactive Twitter feed, like regular Metta World Peace, with more hallucinations. Considering the player-formerly-known-as-Ron-Artest's history with fan interaction and substance abuse, his latest incarnation—asking fans to identify flowers for him!—never ceases to amaze.