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

lol

thank you (capricious and random) universe!

Here I was, ready to submit the following as the-little-Post-that-thought-I-had-to,-even-though-I-knew-better-and-would-rather-go-against-my-instincts-than-run-the-risk-of-disappointing-unseen-and-even-imaginary-Readers Post (which  I will leave, replete with the nearly too clever strike-throughs).

It’s weird.1,029 Posts and I seem to feel that, cut and pasting and re-printing, at least on a large scale is…cheating. No, I take that back. It stranger than that, I mean, hell, with a handful of exceptions, I wrote them all, so it’s not like I would be passing off another person’s effort as my own.  But there is still something not right about ‘writing a Post’ and not have it come out of (wherever words and thoughts and descriptions and such come from) of the package un-read and new to all of us to be read for the first time.

So.  We’re back!¹ I see the answer in front of me. This key point to today’s Post does deserve some explanation. Sometimes, when I set out to write a Post, I know what I want to say and I write it. Other times, I do not have a clue. Sometimes, (when I do not have a clue) I simply start to write and hope to find myself in an interesting place that I can ‘write myself out of” and, still other times, (when I do not have a clue), I look for something strange and random to occur that somehow makes me feel that there is something to write. Today was like this latter situation. The strike-through above is what welcomed me when I sat down at the computer this morning. I felt a need to write a Post and a reluctance to write something that was stupid. During a break, I went to see what I wrote On This Day in Doctrine History (lol  I know…but it sounds so cool!). In any event, when I tried to search old Post, the message that you see in the Title flashed on my screen. I laughed. It made me feel like I could write a Post. Tell me, does that make sense to any of you out there?   So, somehow, the set up was… I know that I should not be overly worried about whether I write a Post today or not, whether I write a good Post or not or, …or is that the true underlying fear, have I run out of interesting and amusing ways to explain the Wakefield Doctrine? Which had my thinking about fear, which lead to:

“…clarks are afraid of nothing and live their entire lives in fear”.

Rather than go over the hard-packed ground of what does this statement ‘mean’ to a clark, lets consider how scotts and rogers would approach this condition. Normally when we attempt to express what fear means to a clark. we talk in terms of  ‘what this represents in the worldview of the Outsider’…. (we would sincerely and with the best of intentions) explain how we  define fear as a component of our world  and how it’s a certain element of our reality….and all the rest. today we will not take that approach. Instead, lets practice what we (me? us?…), preach.  To repeat:

“…clarks are afraid of nothing and live their entire lives in fear”:

• we know what that means…god damn! if we could give the frickin understanding thing a rest…for a minute!  (you rogers and scotts do not have a clue about how wearying it can be to be constantly understanding (or trying to understand) the shit that goes on in the average clark’s life… never mind …we know that it’s not because you don’t care, it’s because your worldviews are different)
• how does that statement make us want to act? (if we could) what would we want to do…. real simple: just not fuckin care  (not in the ‘lack of identification with’ sense of ‘care’, more in the, act without thinking of the ramifications and consequences and implications and all the rest of the stuff that understanding entails… ‘
• how does that statement make us feel?  one word: embarrassed and self-conscious…we know that the world is not judging us, but we have a sneaking suspicion that you (collectively) are comparing  and there is nothing more threatening to a clark than the prospect of being observed and being compared….to everyone else, to the others that seem like us, hell, we’re worried that we’ll be compared to ourselves from a different situation or time (“why, clark!, you seemed so much more confident when you were writing Posts last year! what happened, is there something wrong?)

…ok, totally at my limit today for the ‘how we would act/what we would feel’ take on the clarklike world view.

1) back in the sense of in the process of final edit, 30 minutes of the past 90 being consumed by the image-finding-process, which, by the way, is a Post in and of itself.²

2) yeah, zoe, you’re right! what better time to try and describe the path that lead to the images I use with Post,  than right now…. ok, first search terms was ‘resistance to change’ then I tried, ‘inner secrets (! yeah, that was fun, but nothing I had the nerve to use), then on to ‘Sisyphus’ and finally… (none of us want to think about this one) I typed in  ‘La Danse Apache’  (!! lol  I have no idea and yes, you  the clark in the back of the metaphorical room?  why thank you! I will accept my willingness to go this path as a statement of pride in my people (clarks) and I will feel as good about myself as is possible…)  now, of course, observant Readers will note the ecumenical fellas in the Post photo on the blog homepage… how they ended up there… no, I am all kinds of courageous (as a clark) here at the Doctrine, but I am so not ready to try and figure out why I chose the particular photos to end up on this Post. lol