there, there

Outside my window I heard a man repeatedly shouting, “The ball! The ball!” Considering the affectless tone in which he shouted, I wondered what kind of ball he was shouting about. He didn’t seem frustrated, as if trying to get someone to pass him “the ball” nor did he seem particularly jovial, as if he was going to “the ball” later that evening. I happened to be painting a circle at the same time he was shouting, a serendipitous relief considering a vampiric machine now has my ideas before I do. My painting was starting to shape up. Shadows will do that to a circle. Was the man shouting about this ball? A few days passed and I’m obsessively thinking about all possibilities of what the ball could be. I imagine that this train of thought can be turned into a text for this show but I fear I’m on a slippery slope of synchronicity becoming meaning becoming madness. Yet here it is. I’m electrified when I receive an image of a ball in an email from the gallery. Instant dialysis for a brain full of plastic. I don’t know what to do with this third coincidence. I can hear the man’s voice again, still and stoic as if to say the calming phrase, “there, there,” the ball is there. Instantly I feel the big ball beneath our feet, which encompasses all possibilities of what “the ball” could be. A few weeks passed and the dust that falls on LA is shimmering. I’ve inhaled whole houses. My painting of the ball has become a pill tablet, I learn that the ball in the email is not full of air as I had thought, and now I am not sure what the man was actually shouting or if he ever stopped. Knowing it all to be just as meaningful as it is meaningless, I am here standing in the afterimage of one big coincidence, seeing things that are “there, there” or “là, là” la, la, la-ing while pushing paint around until another one shows up. I think of this show like that.