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 were usually 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) and bringing to bear upon it now my own wet dirty hands
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.)
(Were there a seer or haruspicator who could read the entrails of the crumbs of that bagel plate, so to speak — what would he read into what remains on the plates — the bowls being not bowls but bowels, the utensils intestines, the sinks inverted altars– that cream cheese mingled with the soggy red roasted pepper in the corner portends a favorable conclusion to our armed conflict –. (What is the significance of the scraped-off havarti? What do I read into the presence of that isolated single bean sprout there? in the swirls of grease on the dinner plate? in the half-eaten potato chip, which is green around the edge, and stuck upward in a remnant of quiche crust?)
The haruspicator thinks, though as a general matter he appreciates disorder, he does not like it in the particular flavor that is represented by these plates — where the circles of all the diameters of plates conflict and are at odds, the orbit of their rims all eccentric, where a maximum of instability has been assured. The haruspicator thinks, how his annoyance with other humans and haruspicators can be as irrational and pointless as that he now feels toward these plates: if only the largest plates of that person were on the bottom, and the small toward the top, and the bowel (bowl) at the very top, and the intestines (utensils) inside the bowel (bowl) then I would not be so annoyed with that person as I now am.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 