Irregular stack of dirty plates on the sink side, …. the way they were stacked something particularly displeasing… a burdensome thought “stacked” upon another burdensome thought, a “soiled” thought; the thought of the unseemly soiled plates: it is a disorderliness on top of a dirtiness, an ordinariness on top of a disorderliness, it is an inevitability upon a randomness (things always messed up and off in precisely this fashion) … Overcoming this revulsion (which was, again, not for the extent or degree of dirtiness, or the work it implied, but for its particular arrangement and type, and for the vague awful thought it implied)… the whiteness of the whale, the disorder of the stack…
The white “Avon anniversary plate” between two rose-colored dinner plates, (a plate of smaller diameter between two of the same diameter: why not two dirty plates of the same diameter beneath a third dirty plate of a smaller diameter?), cream cheese on the sides of the bottom-most rose-colored dinner plate (why not cream cheese on a bagel plate, a plate on which items with cream cheese are served?); soup bowl on top of the higher of the two rose plates; another rose colored plate on top of the soup bowl; and a white bagel plate upon that (something very frustrating, to the point of being maddening, about the sight of a plate on top of a bowl. I would much sooner have a bowl facing down upon a bowl that is facing up –which there can be no reason at all for and is totally absurd– than having the bottom of a plate on the top of a bowl.)
I harpooned this “white whale” with these “two harpoons”, my left and right hands, and set it to rites in the dish sink, with the “spume well a-flowin”; yet the ghastly agglomerate of dish and utensil –a green-tinged potato chip projecting from some unfinished quiche– has endured, immitigable in memory, swimming free.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 