And then it hit him...

"But of course," he thought "organization!".

And with that, he began to become that ordinal creature that had interminably existed at his core. He shuffled a deck of cards, and in the dishovel, there it was. Plain as the nose on your face. It was order.

Everything he touched was again as it should be.

The deck, once a jumbled mess of suit and color, of rank out of rank and number following incongruent number now had become perfection and grace, and all with one, solitary shuffle.

"Diamonds, Clubs, Hearts & Spades - low to high, ace on high so that the flush so royal would show every time," it was just as he liked it...just as he needed it to be.

The weeks went by and shirts were ordered in his closet. The plaids, they were with plaids...solids with solids...all of them ranked in order of his colors from favorite to least.

Ties, they were ordered by texture and material, again by pattern and then by color.

His days would be numbered just as his suits, from low to high. It would always be a low day when he got down to his leasts, so it was incentive to do his laundry often to keep his moods good.

"Looking good, Darby!"

"Lookin' sharp there, Darb."

Every day the same exclamations, every day the same expectations. The comely lass, with the comely look.

"Looking good!"

"Felling good, thank you very much," came Darby's usual reply.

His humidor was ordered in accordance to the pungency of the smoke, and then again by color (from light to dark).

Brandies and wines were done likewise, and the spirits, by frequency of use (they really required no firm order, as from this consumption sprang dissaray, and he really did not care which of those he chose as he liked them all equally, and that feeling of power he'd get by pricking one card out of place; by twisting a tab collar slightly askew, or tying the tie in a half-windor).

One day ol' Darby would be buried, and it was said that somehow, there would be order there as well. Perhaps each decaying strand of DNA would be ordered in accord with his favorite building blocks, from the adenine to the thymine, guanine to cytosine and back again in endless combinations that together comprised his favorite order of what Darby McCray believed to be that perfect array of that man of perfectly arrayed perfection.

Order.

So imperfect.

Ain't it grand?