Month: June 2017 | the Wakefield Doctrine

Six Sentence Story -the Wakefield Doctrine-

June 15, 2017 By clarkscottroger

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

Wednesday evening. This is the warm-up phase of my effort to come up with a Six Sentence Story for tomorrow. I kinda wander around in my head, double-check the prompt word. Yep, the word is ‘Link’. Now all I have to do is figure how to write what I think I want to write.

Besides being fun, zoe’s bloghop, the Six Sentence Story, (in which readers are invited to make up a story using exactly six sentences), is not only fun, it’s educational, (lots of excellent writing), and a great opportunity to practice. Sort of like ‘open mike’ for the writing crowd. It’s one thing to ‘practice’ at home. It’s entirely another to write for readers…against a deadline. So come join us.

L*i*n*k

The dog barked a warning to unseen nighttime animals from the quiet living room in the nearly empty house, while in a back bedroom, the man’s concentration remained solidly on shifting one of the tiny parts that made up the intricately carved wooden cube; with a surprisingly loud click and more motion than it’s size should have permitted, a piece moved and, dropping the artifact into the pool of green-felt light, his hands sought comfort at the grey-fringed sides of his head, an unconscious effort to slow the motion that grew from somewhere behind his stomach, rippling up towards his mind, the room around him faded and was redrawn…
[Link].

“I thought you finished your homework, honey,” the tidal wave of disorientation receded and the man felt a growing need to howl at the sudden loss of familiarity, the dark study in the quiet house now replaced with a bright, colorful room and a voice that turned his body in the chair, (his feet somehow not reaching floor), towards the open doorway. The darkness behind the figure flickered with bluish light as a woman, the spitting image of his mother, only much too young, continued to speak, “…your grandfather meant you to have that as a keepsake, not a toy to play with and break,” stepping into the room, the shadows from the hall remained a shawl over her shoulders, she picked up the intricately-carved wooden cube and, touching one side, said, “look you’ve loosened this piece, let me…”
[Link].

“He keeps saying that you must bring something from his room in your home, a small, carved wooden puzzle. I must say, while many of our residents become fixated on certain ideas, it’s usually repetition for its own sake; your grandfather is different, I assume it’s a memento from early in his life, I trust that you haven’t arrived too late…”
[Link].

“Now push… that’s right, keep breathing, just like you practiced,” the young doctor smiled too broadly at the woman on the bed, she knew only the need that grew from her body, when she heard him say, in a tone that strained to overcome his limited experience, “Nurse, I need you here now!”, sensed a quiet increase in activity outside the pool of quiet light…
[Link].

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: relationships, the Wakefield Doctrine

-the Wakefield Doctrine- ‘the coolest thing about the Wakefield Doctrine?’

June 14, 2017 By clarkscottroger

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

The coolest (and best) thing about the Wakefield Doctrine is not that we get to make statements such as “Everyone lives in a perfect world”, and it is not the fun of asserting, “Everyone works exactly as hard at life as everyone else does.” Nope making these statements isn’t what this Post, (and its tantalizing questionistical subtitle), is proposting.

What does makes the Doctrine so cool, is that if a person is able to apply the perspectives inherent in the Doctrine to their world, these (and many other, equally outrageous declarations), become totally self-evident and, true even.

You know whats the hardest part of this ‘applying of (a) Wakefield Doctrine perspective’ process? (And it’s not confined to the Wakefield Doctrine), its that any philosophy or belief system that offers an alternative path (in life and such) always demands payment in exchange for it’s benefits. And, just to make matters worse, the price is not, strictly speaking, a ‘quid pro quo’*. What is asked for/demanded, for the privilege of enjoying the benefits of an additional perspective, is that one relinquish the bedrock-certainty of knowing the nature and character of reality. Many Readers are muttering into coffee-shadowed cups, “Hey! I’m open-minded. I know lots of people who see the world different than me, and, well, I got no problem with that!”

(…almost. this close. Unfortunately, that is not the level of acceptance of the validity and reality of another’s worldview required in order to take full advantage of a perspective(s) as contained in the Wakefield Doctrine.)

But enough of the coyness. Here’s a fun** experiment. I was roaming the contemplative and hallowed halls of the Facebook the other day, and a person wrote about losing friends. He concluded that the cause was related to the current politico-cultural mashup thats currently sweeping the world, (like a seaweed and ice cream sandwich wrapper cluttered wave, moon-pushed up the beach farther than any of the previous 3,897 waves). Anyway, being a thoughtful person, he wrote that maybe it was something in him, maybe his own views (on the state of ‘the world’) were at the heart of the problem of otherwise seemingly compatible people running away.

I offered the following: find a person in your life that has seemed like a normal, regular person who, if they are not currently long-standing friends, have the resume to make a successful bid for the job… except of one part. They are totally fervent believers in (fill in the blank with politics/religion/scientific opinion…whatever). You are forced to scratch your head and think (or say), “I just don’t understand how a person like Joe/Jane can believe in that!! He/She is an intelligent, educated, accomplished person, but they believe in….” Now imagine that, from their perspective (i.e. the reality that they are experiencing) there is nothing incongruous in their beliefs.

When you can be comfortable with that, you’re ready to pay the price for the power of alternate perspectives on reality.

And, the irony is that for most of us, when we confront the notion of surrendering the exclusivity of an idea or belief, premise or tenet, our initial reaction is that we are being threatened with a loss. When, in fact, when we accept that our belief or tenet or premise or perspective is not exclusive, we open ourselfs to adding to what we have, what we are.

Ya know?***

* Latin phrase inserted to culture-up this little post, and since there isn’t an ‘Illuminated Text’ font handy, this will have to suffice to provide, you know credentials.

** no, really, it is fun

*** well, sure I can explain what I mean by the cool thing about making inflammatory and outrageous statements and claims and such… have to be the next post… be sure to bring along your scottian aspect!

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: Personal, personality types, predicting human behavior, psychology of personality, relationships, self-improvement, the Wakefield Doctrine

Two ‘T’ oh ‘T’ -the Wakefield Doctrine-

June 11, 2017 By clarkscottroger

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

Sunset over the land on the far side of the harbor of the Port of Galilee in Narragansett RI. We’re standing in the parking lot. The sun has just touched the earth and is putting up a fight. The center of the sun is too-bright-to-look-at white but it’s bleeding red to the sides, the remains of the day spreads, bright yellow into pale yellow into a tired rose, spreading to the right and left. The color, more hues and shades than primary colors, stands out against the dark line of the earth. The top third of the scene is comprised of evening gray clouds against the previous afternoon’s blue sky, settling downwards, like blankets on an un-made bed. In the immediate foreground is water, bracketed by boats tied up to docks. There is a single, vertically-serrated line of sunlight that crosses the water in the middle of scene. If you’re inclined to think that this line (which almost touches the setting sun) is a support, a pylon for the still too bright to see sun, you’d be disappointed. If you stare at the light in the water, you end up feeling certain that it, (the line of sunlight), is a hopeless lifeline thrown towards shore.

This is the Ten Things of Thankful bloghop. Organized and presented by Josie Two Shoes every weekend, the TToT is a grat ‘hop with a difference. As the title suggests, the idea is to relate to readers and fellow writers the people, places and things for which you are grateful. What sets this grat blog apart is that the only true requirement (for participation) is ‘good intent’. (Yes, that is a rather vague term. It is also a hugely inclusive, wildly open-ended term, which is why I use it. A very simple ambition, though, to act with good intent. But now I run the risk of stem winding*, so on with the show.)

Lets begin with something simple… (someone tell zoe that ‘guffaw’ is not, in most circles, the optimal response)

2) A Friday Walk with Una (unplugged)

3) What do you mean, ‘Where did Number 1 go?’ How would I know?! Here I am, sitting at my computer on a Sunday morning looking for a photo of Phyllis to anchor it’s own Item and I realize that not only am I out of sequence, there are numbers missing!

5) Hey! Go to Amazon at this link and treat yerself to a muy coolita** coloring book created by our friend Cynthia, she is a living example that with determination and a willingness to follow the path no matter what, a person can totally self-develop themselfs. Go to her site ‘Intuitive and Spiritual‘ she’ll show you how.

Una sitting at the dining room table. In front of her (she is facing to the left in the spindle-back chair), on a white tablecloth with a field of small rose-colored squares, is a black laptop computer. On top of the laptop is a gift from Friend of the Doctrine Cynthia. It’s copy of her just-published adult coloring book, ‘The Tree of Life’. The cover has a tree taking up the top 2/3s. The tree is a very simple trunk, two parallel lines rising and curling apart to blend in with the individual leaves of the tree. These leaves are elongated ovals with smaller colorful ovals contained within. It is a very cool thing.

6) Phyllis and Una

Phyllis and Una. Phyllis has her hand on Una’s head and laughing at the camera, in part, and you have to look closely, due to the fact that Una, for reasons known only to her, is sticking her tongue out.

8) Garden Update:

A photo in portrait orientation (taller than it is wide by half). We’re standing before the Una garden, the ‘U’ is easily discerned with it’s brown, raw soil cut out of the pale green of the lawn. From where we stand, the ‘U’ could be an ‘n’. The open part of the letter is to the left, the bottom is to the right. The other letters, due to the angle, are visible only as thin brown lines shrinking into the distance. (The space within both the ‘n’ and the ‘a’ of ‘Una’ is foreshortened so much as to be non-distinguishable). Above and beyond the letters the lawn continues until it runs into a wall of tall pine trees. The horizontal branches of the trees are lighter and almost fuzzy green. The trunks of the trees are black and very straight, parallel lines. In the immediate foreground left, is our cairn. The pile of stones and rocks. They are roughly rounded in texture and the predominate shape is cubes-trying-to-be-squares. There is an oval stone, long axis upright, in the front of the pile from our perspective. Colors fall victim to texture, grayish white, turning dark from shades formed by their own surfaces. They look old and common, but friendly enough.

View of the garden from the house. Actually from a second story window. The letters are clearly letters, (capital ‘U’, small ‘n’ and small ‘a’). The brown of the raw soil ranges from dark, (where the soil appears damp), to light brown. The cairn is to the far left side of the photo and the rocks look pretty much all white, but that ‘stone white’ rather than chalk white. It’s easy to see the individual stones, being as ‘simply solid’ as stones tend to be, what little space might be between the individual rock are full of shadow black, contrasting nicely, even at this distance.

9) Home and Heart (a Sister Margaret Ryan story). Double Chapter week this week! Chapters 11 and 12 will be out tomorrow morning. (For those falling behind on our tale, Sister Margaret is having lunch with her mother and her brother, Father Matthew Stephen, (yeah, seems to run in the family). She is asked to do something about the foreclosure on the family home. Meanwhile, Sister Catherine is with Roanne Avila getting similar bad news from an attorney about the recently-windowed young woman’s home and, worse, there appears to be a problem reaching her daughter, Patrice. Finally, Arlen Mayhew (yes, a descendant of the Thomas Mayhew, who established the first settlement on Martha’s Vineyard) and Drusilla Renaude (of Renaude and Associates, the brokerage selected by the Bernebau Company to market their newest development to be located in and around Crisfield MD), are on a corporate jet headed to Miami. There. All caught up. Join us at ‘Home and Heart’ things are about to get curiouser and curiouser

7) Lets go for a quick visit to the 1980s for a little music to get out of this admittedly odd TToT post.

10) SR 1.3

* ‘Stem winding’, hey! I thought the phrase meant, to indicate, by the winding of a watch, that a speech is going long. Apparently there is more, including it’s first usage as a statement of high quality, from back when a wristwatch was a luxury. Here… read it for yourself.

** probably not ‘real’ Spanish… heck, probably not real words in any langauge

Click on this here icon here and come join us at the TToT (“tell ’em the Doctrine sent ya’)

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: relationships, self-improvement, the Wakefield Doctrine

six sentence story -the Wakefield Doctrine

June 8, 2017 By clarkscottroger

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

(Heading out into Wednesday…wish me luck, meetcha back here Wednesday evening)

Made it. Now for a little stretching and exercise. Now is the time for all good…

…ok, lets try this: detective story in first person.

This is, of course, zoe’s weekly bloghop, the Six Sentence Story. The prompt word is ‘LIFT’.

I heard the lock on the outer door to my office close with the carved metal click that made me glance towards the drawer that held my .38. Although it was 1:33 am, a time of night when reasonable people are home, asleep in bed, the sound didn’t much bother me. The fact that I didn’t hear the door open, did. As I followed the lead of my reflection in the rain-streaked windows, turning away from dark city streets to face the door, I put my right hand in the now open desk drawer.

Backlit by the bright ceiling lights of the outer office was a woman with a body that was born to take hostages, a heartbeat later I heard a contralto voice that made the word ‘sultry’ sound like ‘lemonade and cookies’; I wanted nothing more out of life than to listen to that voice, “I hope I have right office, the directory in the lift listed ‘Desiderata Investigations’ as being on this floor, but didn’t give the office number.”

I took my hand off the revolver and grabbed my heart; like jumping into a lifeboat swinging off the side of sinking boat, I suspected that one was going to get me killed a lot faster than the other.

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology Tagged With: self-development, self-improvement, the Wakefield Doctrine

TToT -the Wakefield Doctrine-

June 4, 2017 By clarkscottroger

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

A seagull standing on top of a piling as the ferry to Block Island recedes in the distance. A seagull (in a photo that is mostly shades grey) is a close to what ‘if God were a child and was asked to do a drawing using only three crayons. (no, seriously) As animals depicted in photos go, the seagull in the photo is a badly drawn oval, with two vertical lines for legs, a hooked horizontal line for a beak and a stab of black for an eye. it’s tail is designated by a rough serration of the end of the oval opposite it’s head. The setting, a pier in the fishing port of Galilee in Narragansett Rhode Island. shows the parallel rows of pilings from the perspective of looking down the wooden decked pier. Being of nearly the same dimensions, the effect is almost a vanishing point perspective The gull stand on the second nearest piling on the left. The immediate left of the photo (from bottom to almost the top of the frame) is a piling. It has cracks and fissures running from top, downwards, the very top is slightly beveled and there are streaks of green lining the cracks, moss growing on the wood. The parallel rows of pilings converge so that after the second piling (where the seagull stands) we don’t see them as individual upright posts, rather it looks like a wall running downwards. The top of these tow walls show steps downward as it recedes into the distance, the only indication that this is not a solid wall of brown word, rather is an equally spaced row of posts that we can’t see in between…of…. lol The sky is mattress gray with a soft lumpiness that implies a light behind (or above them).

Josie Two Shoes‘ (or, Josie Two Shoes…. or, it could be Josie Two Shoe’s….. Josie Two Shoeseseses)…. in any event, welcome to Josie (of the multiple foot coverings)’s Ten Things of Thankful bloghop. It’s easy to participate. The benefits are as varied as the participants, but, then that’s the internet for ya.

1) dogs

Una and a Bed. We know it’s Una because of the pink tab at the bottom of a black triangle of black fur. the central feature in the photo is the bedpost, seen in close-up. A light brown (maple) the post looks like the Pawn in a giant, wooden chess set.

2) Una and Phyllis

Standing behind Una who looks out a window down at Phyllis who is in her blue Mini (with a white racing stripe) with the top down, backing out of the driveway in front of the house.

3) books by friends click here for Cynthia’s excellent website, below on the book to see it on Amazon)

Click on this here book cover here. You work really hard at… well, at stuff. You owe it to yourself to provide your tired brain and worn down heart a little positivity…. get yerself one of these books.

4) Chapter 11 of ‘Home and Heart’ coming early this week. Chapter 10 is out on jukepop (don’t forget to vote!)

5) I received a rejection letter from an agent this week that I choose to perceive as progress along a certain continuum. Most are professional and polite and, inevitably impersonal. The follow excerpt made we sit back and say ‘whoa’ (and ‘ …whoa’ and ‘damn’) etc:

While I found your characters to be engaging, I personally didn’t connect with the pacing, and because of this, I feel that I cannot represent this novel to the best of its ability.

So the thing about this letter that qualifies it for inclusion on this week’s TToT is that there is constructive feedback in it. (What it suggests is that while writing a book as a serial is good, it may have an effect on the how the story comes across when finally complete and compiled. Note: this agent asked for 50 pages as part of my query letter, most submission guidelines ask for 10 pages.) While a rejection letter might, at first blush, appear to be an Item of hypo-gratitude* in this case it was not.

6) Una Garden update (‘runn, Foress…ruunn’)

When art hijacks practicality… also known as ‘sending a clark to do a roger’s job’ This photo is a taller than wide photo of a branch stuck in the ground to serve as support to a growing tomato plant. The bottom half shows a rectangle of mottled brown dirt. There is tiniest of hints of a curve to the top edge, no one would be surprised to hear that it is a section of the capital ‘U’ in the ‘Una’ garden. The tomato plant has triangular leaves on branches extending to either side of the stake. There is a viney sinuousness to the way the separate branches of the tomato plant extends to either side. The stake is a tree limb of maybe half a thumb and forefinger around size. It appears to be at least three feet tall and has a near 90 degree angle at the top. Totally looks like a cane, stuck in the ground. Like the tomatoes are expected to be pumpkin sized or something. In the top left of the photo is the pile of rocks, light, stone-colored, with the solidly rounded shape of worn granite stones.

7) the Wakefield Doctrine

8) the Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules) specifically and by example, provides a rule that allows using negative events as an Item. SR 7.3.2[sub chap: b{9}] which states, in part, “..having had a week populated with flat tires, broken shoe laces, Dear John letters, good fer nuthin boyfriends, failure of appliance a day after expiration of Warranty (and an hour before totally necessary use), writers block, writers cramp, stiff neck, sore back and a spellczech that changes your refined insights into the mindless, obscene braying of a drunken crowd at an after-hours demolition derby, sometimes things just suck. In such circumstances, with sufficient documentation, it is acceptable to cite an event/occurence/mood or screw-up as one of the Ten Things of Thankful, provided it has been clearly identified as such. (Exception Case 9..1 “…[m]ore than 3 Items of hypograt and you’re just messin with the Rules; more than 8 and you probably need to update your bookmarks.”)

10) SR 1.3

* no, really! hypo-grat is a ‘real thing’… check Item 8