Free A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker Page A

fine. Is it, on the other hand, the sound of a coherent fluid stream hitting porcelain? That may be good or it may not be good, depending on whether you’re hitting the porcelain of the actual inside of the bowl, around the water, or the porcelain on the edge. A doubt arises. Very probably it’s the porcelain near the water. You’ll know that it is near ifyou make a tiny left or right adjustment and hear the confirming sound of water. And you wonder, Which way do I adjust the aim? It seems like I might be aiming a little too much to the left. So you correct by directing the stream a little to the right, and the sound changes, and now you’re in trouble, because it’s the sound, you’re pretty sure, of pee hitting rim and maybe even floor, so you quick jerk back to what you think is your original position. But it isn’t the original position. You’ve lost your bearings now, you’re wandering in an unknown forest, and you have a suspicion that maybe the stream has split into a V; when that happens, no amount of course correction will help. You clamp off the outflow and turn on the light to take stock. If you can’t see anything on the floor, you’re okay, but if there’s an obvious small pool, then you have to get the undersink sponge going or use bunched-up toilet paper to dab it up, and the bending with the bunched toilet paper sends blood to the head, further waking you up. Now you’re much more awake than you would have been had you turned on the light in the first place. Not all of the pee will be cleaned, either, because it is the middle of the night, and nobody cleans things up that well in the middle of the night. Eventuallyover some weeks a faint smell will arise. That’s why I recommend sitting.
    Also, if you sit your activity is silent; whereas if you stand and you are lucky enough to hit water, the cat wakes up at the noise and may pluck the bed.
    Passing me by, passing me by. Life is. Five years ago I planned to write a book for my son called
The Young Sponge
. I was going to give it to him as a birthday present. It was going to be the adventures of a cellulose kitchen sponge that somehow in the manufacturing is made with a bit of real sea sponge in it, giving it sentient powers. It lives by the sink but it has yearnings for the deep sea; it thirsts for the rocky crannies and the briny tang. Then Nickelodeon came up with a show, and a pretty good one, about a sponge. My idea was instantly dead: my son would think I was merely copying a TV show. Nickelodeon had acted, I had only planned to act.
    Speaking of creative torpor, when my half-eaten apple fell off the ashcan just now, it occurred to me that I don’t really know what the Ashcan school of art is. Yesterday evening I felt the fireplace ash. It was cool, finally: deep-red bits can stay alive for many hours. I shoveled some of it into the tin container with a lid that was here when wemoved in—it must be the ashcan. The ash was a very light grey, almost white, and very fine—composed mostly, I imagine, of clay, which doesn’t burn when paper burns. Henry, who was watching me, said: “Dad, think of all the stuff we’ve burned, and it all goes down to this much.” It was only the third time I’ve shoveled out the fireplace. The ungraspableness of history, which can seem thrilling or frightening depending on your mood, can assert itself at any moment. I just found another small bedroll of lint in my automatic lint-accumulator and I tossed it into the fire: there was an almost imperceptible flare of differently colored fire—ah!
lint fire
—and it was gone. That is part of why I like looking at these burning logs: they seem like years of life to me. All the particulars are consumed and left as ash, but warm and life-giving as they burn. Meanwhile the duck is outside in the cold. She piles her excretions high in one corner, according to Claire, and she has a little declivity in the wood chips, where she fluffs up her feathers, but she’s got