Diseased Bowling Ball

In honor of the Professional Bowling Assocation National Tournament that is going to be held in Spartanburg later this month, a bunch of local artists were asked to decorate bowling balls for auction. The completion of the bowling balls have been the theme of the week over here.

This is a picture I took on my camera phone to explain to my friend Aaron why I (regretfully) couldn’t make it out to watch football. It was not yet done when I took this picture, but you can get the idea.

I initially had the idea because I have always been a little creeped out by the perceived “germiness” of bowling alleys. Of course, they disinfect the shoes, but who actually cleans out the holes where everyone shoves their sweaty fingers and thumbs? I wanted to get a bunch of “germs” and have them grow out of the finger holes to overtake the ball. Meanwhile, a lot of people have been reading an environmental meaning in the whole thing, some kind of cancerous growth enveloping a sphere. I welcome that association, but I must insist that, for once in my life, I was not thinking about the apocalypse.

Tangentially, while I was working on this project, I had a dream that there was a new communicable disease (basically the new STD or something, but it didn’t have to be transmitted sexually) that was going around. It was sort of kin to lice in that it infested the hair, was invisible to the naked eye, and was similarly transmitted: from close contact with things that people who had it used near their head (brushes, pillow cases, etc.) The only difference was that once you contracted it, you had it for life. There was no getting rid of it. It was called “frogs.” You couldn’t see “frogs” but different lenses were invented to be able to detect whether or not someone had it. “Frogs” were literally miniscule frogs that lived in your hair, but through the lens, they looked like little green bubbles, jumping and popping around your head like fizz. I think this little tidbit was inspired by the bowling ball, and hence the purpose of relating it here. Anyway, in my dream, I was a man and I had frogs and was open about it and therefore being responsible about containing the disease and its spread. Meanwhile, my best friend also had frogs but was not “out,” and was still using normal hair salons and such (at this point, special salons had been set up for froggers), therefore selfishly spreading the disease. I spent most of the dream trying to convince him to come out, and then trying to out him myself when he did not. Strange.