the Wakefield Doctrine

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine ( the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

….in response to the Progenitor rogers request to hear tales of my adventures in a convention center packed with scotts and rogers, it is effectively impossible to separate what I was thinking and what I was doing. Imagine having your own Morgan Freeman, walking behind you through the course of a day. To accurately portray the experience of a clark, our OPMF (our personal Morgan Freeman) would not simply describe what is happening but also the why (it is happening the way it is). This is, in fact, the nature of the worldview of a clark.

The first day started with a Keynote Speech by a leading expert in the field. The convention hall was across the street from the hotel, there were conventioneers aplenty, but there were not so many people that there was  a ‘constant crowd’ …no jostling elbows, long lines in the hotel lobby, long waits for elevators or sharing cabs. In fact, the physical scale of the convention center was so expansive, that at times it seems deserted! This first morning the crowd so moderate, that there were only 2 other people on the escalator going up to the main hall, where the Keynote Address was to be held. I turned to a young woman standing 2 steps below me and started with a little joke, like this: “this is the quietest big convention that I have ever been to”    and she smiled, laughed and agreed. The conversation continued as we walked around looking for the entrance to the hall. Small talk continued through the process of getting coffee, which is something I would ordinarily not do and on into the hall to an empty table. ( the arrangement at these affairs are often a giant hall filled with round tables with maybe 8 chairs at each.
(OPMF: our clark knows he needs to do something, feels lucky that he has a relatively isolated setting to ‘make his move’, i.e. the clever observation about how different this convention was from others. We should note that he uses this first observation to lead to his rogerian connective device, “not at all like the convention last year in Dallas”  This is the Wakefield Doctrine working! Our clark knows that rogers will always find a way to identify themselves with the largest level of the herd, in this case, the herd that attends real estate conventions. This simple statement, “…not like at the Five Star Convention last year” serves this purpose.)

It is important to remind our scottian and rogerian Readers: for a clark there is very, very little distinction between the world inside and the world ‘out there’, aka the real world. Today’s Post is an honest accounting of my experience.  While our rogerian colleague asks for the real, the personal, what ‘actually it felt like’…what it actually felt like was:

• fear of not being able to step beyond the observer role
• resignation to the reality that, as I see (other) people as ‘them’, there is and always will be an emotional gap
• annoyance at the recognition of the fact that while, as a clark, I am capable of enduring incredible ‘bad things’ for the sake of a goal, I am (almost) totally incapable of recognizing, accepting and benefitting from success

I went to this convention with the goal of seeing how much I have changed as a result of  understanding the principles of the Wakefield Doctrine. I set before myself (and the Readers) a test, a task, a trial, the results of which would be a measure of the degree of change effected by the Doctrine. I went, I made small talk, I asked people for their names before they asked mine, I offered my business card and asked for theirs, I sat with a stranger at an empty table without it having to look like an accident. In short, I had an experience much as did everyone else there in Ft Worth Texas.

(however), as a clark, I did not feel like a roger, although I recognized my scottian aspect at times, I kept looking for the groups of people with whom I could forcibly mingle with ( omg! only a frickin clark would come up with the concept! forcible mingling.. “Officer thank god you got here in time!! he was so well dressed and seemed nice, but then he started to mingle, I swear I did nothing to encourage him!“).
As a clark, I can see how the manner in which I relate this experience as coming off as being ‘cut and dry’ and impersonal.

But the experience last week,  was, in fact, both…I felt good when I talked to strangers…but this good feeling was as much centered on my going through with the ‘experiment’,  as it was about that (particular) person, that (particular) conversation, that (individual) interaction.

At the moment I have a feeling of accomplishing something impressive. It is a positive feeling, it is a good feeling, unfortunately, as our clarklike Readers will know,  I am uncomfortable telling people how well I did, or how proud I am of this process. And this is probably the worst thing about the worldview of a clark… (my) tendency is to pass all of what happened off to the Doctrine, or to the ‘live experiment’, to do anything rather than accept that I have changed and grown and improved.

(…hey Mr B. yo!  get out of the janitor’s closet and get us some fine Wednesday music you old relic bastard you)

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine ( we have the answer, you just need to know the right question!)

(ed. note. I have a slight problem, in the form of a note that I apparently left myself last night. Hold on, let me start this way: I recall in the first year of writing this blog,  I asked ‘Mel’ how he went about writing for ‘the Spatula’. He told me that he had a ‘white board’ in his office and would write interesting news headlines, things he heard on TV and anything else that struck him as odd or interesting. He would do this over the course days, until a theme or idea (for) a Post took shape. He would then elaborate, expand and otherwise shape it into what would become a Post. I asked the Progenitor roger the same question, and his answer was much the same (minus the white board). He said that he would wait for an idea to occur and approach it like a ‘book report’ or ‘term paper’, writing everything he could about the subject and spending days refining and polishing until he was satisfied. (New Readers! Both of these eminently readable authors are rogers, the significance of this fact will become apparent as you learn more of the Doctrine.)
While I will not to attempt to describe my own process* I will say this, when I sat down at my computer this morning I saw a note on my Ampad Gold Fibre pad that simply said, ‘write something heart-warming‘.  heart-warming??!  Holy shit! I’m a frickin clark, I don’t ‘do heart-warming’!  thats for rogers! (and other girls)** But, hey what are ya gonna do!)

As I stood in the lobby of the Omni Hilton in Ft Worth at 3:30 am this Saturday, waiting for my car to take me to the airport, two things demanded my attention:

…from the elevators a very attractive  woman in a short black dress emerged and walked past the Front Desk and into the seating area of the Lobby. She was blond, tall, in her late twenties and tired, but tired in a ‘one more lap to go’ kind of way. I say this because she walked very purposely to a comfortable chair near the fireplace, looked around the lobby with a frown on her face and upon sitting, immediately took out her iPhone and become totally engrossed, if not seemingly aggravated with whatever she was reading.

… just as my car pulled up to the front door, in from the sidewalk walked a young couple. They both seemed to be in their early twenties and two things made them impossible to not watch:  they were both totally engrossed in each other (but not in a clingy, lovey-dovey way) and the way they walked. They walked as it might have been 11:00 in the morning or the middle of the afternoon. Not a hint of fatigue. Not the slightest sign of ‘it’s so early’, just walking and talking and talking to each other. They appeared to be not tired, not drunk,  stoned or hyper …simply enjoying what they were doing. They walked through the Lobby doors, went to the elevators and disappeared.

That is the heart-warming story, from the most recent Doctrine Road Trip.

* not sure if there is a school of rhetoric that ascribes to the notion: ‘if you don’t have any idea what to write, come up with a subtitle or a music video, everything else will follow”

** the style of scotts?  …no, you don’t want to know  lol