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

Una (world traveler) looks out from her private (and portable) cabin during a layover in Frankfort.’

A quiet sort of TToT post this week. A lot of the (potential) Grat Items piling up in my head are, in fact, of ‘the world virtual’. Prompted in no small part by the FTSF ‘hop of yesterday. It gave us licence¹ to spend some time in the past, more specifically, the past here in the ‘sphere. Which is kinda where my head is at this morning. The blog post in question is from 2009. It was like, all of the fifth month I’d been writing this blog, but for reasons I’m just beginning to understand, it stands out in my memory. Phyllis asked something about the post, along the lines of how ‘everyone’ reacted. That triggered a total flashback episode, (do your own wavy screen), of the very early days, not something a clark is not naturally predisposed to do. Of course, the reason I started a blog was the Wakefield Doctrine.² In any event, I think that the post was one of the thresholds necessary for me to cross that I might continue to write; like a clark.

So, I will get all referential³ and list what I remember as the path (or, like an adult returning to a childhood home town, I’ll point and insist (convincingly, it is hoped) that promontory, from which I jumped into ocean, was much higher than it appearss or that the walk to my old elementary school only looks like a single, sidewalked block.)

The thing about this blog, (and me and the internet), is that it was all driven by the Wakefield Doctrine. I was talking to a young clark yesterday, which is a treat (like getting the next-the-last-spelling-word correct) and I recounted an Easter story from my past that I often relate to other clarks. (The thing about the story is that, while everyone feels sympathetic, a clark will respond on a visceral level.) It was the Easter Egg hunt story.**

Okay, I jumped my formatting a bit. So, let’s try to get things back on track. So I wrote blogs ’bout every day in the first few years and, in the name of getting the Doctrine in as many people as possible, I got on ‘the Facebook’. Thats when I began to meet the remarkable people who I now count as friends. The aforementioned Finish the Sentence Friday bloghop was the first of my active participation with people in the virtual world. So, here’s one of my favorite photos⁵

So the rest is the present. I’ve been totally lucky in encountering only people of good intent. Interesting, when I first ventured out, I was all, ‘Lets see them try to attack and/or make fun of me and this Wakefield Doctrine.’ The thing was, they never showed up. I was, for a while, all, ‘Oh man! I’ve got to get better exposure. No one is challenging my on the efficacy or effectiveness of the Doctrine. I’m failing in my mission.’ Slowly, (am a clark, remember?) I realized that it is possible to hang out with cool people without the occasional ‘what the hell are you doing here, you don’t belong.’

Lets close this out. Una, she totally gets her own footnote.

1. the founderess of this very bloghop, Lizzi Lewis who lives in the future, (well, relative to us, here in the States, she’s at least five hours ahead; if you get a text from the UK cap-lettering that there are Four Horsemen heading east, you’d do well to back up those old posts and clear your browser history) and in Great Britain. A typically un-assuming village by the name of East Hollandaise o’er Hardtack, in the Medium Low Counties (Village motto: ‘articles?! we don’t need any articles, any freshman at university could tell ‘ye that!’)
2. call it the ‘sine qua non’ (yeah, go ahead, this is the Doctrine where, as Humpty Dumpty reminds us, words are our friends.) Or, if so inclined, get tangled* in the debate that this is a Doctrine blog or merely my blog about the Doctrine. I’d be willing to take either side.
3. sometimes it seems like we’re all, ‘rogers are a pain in the neck’, but, as we know (if, that is, we’ve been doing our Wakefield Doctrine study) if it weren’t for rogers we’d live in a world without stable cultures, electronic devices, over-bearing laws and a judicial system. We’d totally be trying to remember how the ‘8 times table’ goes and hoping that the scottian designer of the airliner we’re riding in didn’t just spot the new intern and left the backup safety design to the clark who really thinks that couches and a bathroom for every passenger makes sense for transcontinental travel. In any event, rogers do this thing called a rogerian expression where they take a word and use in a way at once improper and totally amusing. Here click this to the page that includes a list of rogerian expressions.
4. I am grateful for this story. It (now) elicits a feeling, an actual emotional feeling (lol) for my fellow clarks. Sure, I identify with clarks and see, in how they relate themselves to the world around them, myself and by doing so improve my-own-self. But I feel a love and admiration for them knowing that they got through events like this and are still fighting the secret fight to become a real person.
5. Cynthia
   *
6.  Una (top photo, of course!)
7. Josie Two Shoes (if you realized how often I’ve had to go between ‘text’ and ‘visual’ to keep the formatting from careening off the page like a car in an old time movie, you’d be saying, ‘Well, at the heart of this post is the person who puts in the time and effort to make it available for those with too many words in their head.’ Thanks J.)
8. THIS SPACE AVAILABLE!  (If you’re out there and have not yet participated in the TToT but really want to, send a Grat Item***
9. Sunday Supplement
10. Secret Rule 1.3

* the rhetorical equivalent of a nice, over-sized quilt used for mid-winter afternoon naps… ‘tangle’ isn’t always a bad thing.

** so, I was, like five years old and there was an Easter Egg hunt in Oak Bluffs. There was a large, rectangular field and on the street end all the children were lined up with their parents and families behind them and the Starter stood on the forward left edge. The eggs were, of course, up in the field which actually was mostly grass. I’d spent most of a sleepless night planning and rehearsing in my head how I might do best. For some reason, a reason now lost in the litter of a lifetime of memories, I started running before the official start. I got a pretty good distance before I realized something was wrong. (lol… yeah) I finally stopped and turned around.    ….they waited for me to return to the starting line.⁴
*** Subject to the Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules), some restrictions may apply