Month: August 2018 | the Wakefield Doctrine

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

“J’accuse…!”
Farmer Oppenheimer was heard to say, shoulders slumped as he looked out over the once burgeoning spiral of life-giving corn. Resigned to the inevitable, it was the same tone of voice with which he argued to get off the path that he’d been set upon by the dogs of war
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

This week is over. And thank goodness for that! I’m certain that, weird as I might be, I’m not the only one who noticed that someone was playing tricks with time this week past. And not the run-of-the-mill, ‘what time did you say it was? no way! that was the fastest morning ever!’. No, nothing so…common. It was more, (to self): ‘Why is my calendar so empty today..oh, it’s not Monday, its Wednesday.’ or even, “No, we have to get this done for the weekend, so lets start right now. … three days? what are you talking about three days left, it’s Thursday afternoon!…right?”

(Helpful Tips for Newer TToT participants: Say you’re writing your list and things are going smoothly, as you recount a period of time, (could be the week that has just passed, or maybe the semester in college when it finally registered that you were living on your own), anything. Then seemingly out of nowhere you run up against a thing, event, occurrence or an interaction with that-really-annoying-middle-manager* that has you thinking, ‘Nah, no way I’m grateful for that!’ There are two frequently observed approaches to dealing with the negative and/or awful things that happen to all of us: a) find the positive in it (good) or 2) refer to it as a ‘Item of Hypogratitude’ and pull that Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules) down from the shelf.(maybe not as good, but more fun)

Of course, the bottom line here at the TToT, is that there is no requirement for what makes a ‘good’ TToT post. (I might argue, ‘well, ‘good intent’ surely is a requisite.) But as our host, Kristi would surely say, ‘Joining-in is, in and of itself, both a reward and a gift (to the others).’

Hey, this has been a fun intro. I’m glad I took this route…. because, cha-ching! three Grat Items!

Lets get this party started. Grat Items for me this week:

1) Una

“Come back here again and I’ll moidalize ya!**”

(Landscape orientation)
The corn spiral forces the mottled-green (one would be forgiven for insisting its a ‘motley green’) lawn to serve as the natural backdrop it is so suited to being. The top border of the photo shows the dark pine woods behind, with the pale wood rail fence just before and below. This is a statement both of function and potential for the woods and the fence.
In the lower center of the photo, Una sits on her haunches, leaning forward at the shoulders, staring intently at something we viewers are not privileged to see.
The center of the photo is taken up by the corn spiral. Looking more like the day after the first day of the Battle of the Marne, there are as many stalks lying on the grass as there are upright and reaching for the heavens. (Not that I’m inclined to leaps of fancy, but am I the only one to feel the slight trill of sympathy (with an edge of irony) for the corn? It puts its everything into growing from the earth, reaching for un-attainable sky little realizing that success is rewarded with obliteration?)
But I digress…half of the corn plants are lying on the grass, like bent and broken drinking straws. The squirrel demon who would rule the garden un-opposed, were it not for a certain dog.

2) Phyllis

3) Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules)

4) ‘Intro grat’ A (I’d footnote or otherwise hyperlink this up to the intro above, but then you’d never get to finish reading the post, ya know?)

5) Just a thought: I enjoyed captioning the photos but it occurred to me that I might not have provided sufficient backstory for proper enjoyment (or allowing for a reader being a relatively normal person finding themselves falling, small glass bottle in hand, labelled: ‘Read Me’.) The cause of the dying spiral corn is that darn squirrel! I was going to cite the intro again, but, you know how I mentioned that ‘there were no rules other than ‘good intent’? Well, as much as I will maintain that as a worthy attitude goal, I have certain reservations. (Most of which are grounded in my early socialization experiences, the ones that commenced when I moved into my dorm in college.) Ah ha! There! My music video for the week.

6) Current weather! Hot and humid. Love it. (For me the answer to the timeless Summer question is always, “Why no, no it is not.”)

7) the Writers Club. Only a few weeks in existence and its value has been established. (It saved me from a boring afternoon) You want to have some fun? Go to this post, at the Club and join in. If you’re not a member and would like to participate, comment here or there and I’ll totally open the door to the clubhouse. ( Or ask one of the members, Valerie or Denise, Mimi or Pat Brockett or Kerry

8) THIS SPACE AVAILABLE (There may be a reader out there thinking they would like to join in, however the mere thought of committing to Ten Items (more or less) is a fun-leaching concern. Not to worry. Send (as a comment) your Grat Item (with whatever form of attribution you’d like) and I will post it here! (no, think nothing of it… you’re the one taking the chance…. I mean, have you read this post?!?! lol)

9) Sunday Supplement

Phyllis, Una and the Doctrine.
Pretty much covers it all, non?

10) Secret Rule 1.3 (in part: “[t]he fact of (the) completion of a List of Ten Things of Thankful constitutes, in and of itself, an Item of Gratitude (citation: ‘Thank God! I’m done and it’s still Saturday!’ Rule BoSR/SBoR c. 2009-2018 Manchester UK, Wakefield RI

* the person in the organization with more power to make life un-necessarily difficult that anyone can explain, the one you want to grab by the shoulders and shout, “No! No one here calls that ‘the Bible’… No one. They call it the SOP, if they call it anything. Not even you call it ‘the Bible’ except when you have someone in front of you who doesn’t know any better or is too mature to shout and walk out!”

** Curly, on innumerable occasions.

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

This is surely Tuesday (or Wednesday, this week has been rife with ‘day-swapping’; Wednesday trying to be carefree Friday, mild Tuesday taking on stern Thursday-like airs…. you know, like that). In any event, it is time for this week’s Six Sentence Story.

(Each week), our host, Denise offers a prompt word and invites each and all of us to fashion a story around that word. The only requirement is the story must be Six Sentences long (as opposed to twenty-seven or eighteen sentences in length). We then quickly, before our inner critic starts whispering poisonous suggestions such as, ‘hey! I know this well, I could come here with my eyes closed!’ or “Given the viscera in stainless steel trays and the fact it hasn’t drawn a breath in two days, perhaps the equine has expired” (lol, yeah, this is all a last-ditch attempt to throw that part of myself off its rhythms), link up, read every single other post and comment the hell out of them. Like that, ya know? The result is fun with words!

This week we go to the ‘real’ world for inspiration. March 26, 1911 and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The young (and ravenous) god of industrialization, was growing hydra-like at the dawn of the 20th Century, wherever it could find sufficient raw materials and a devote clergy. Unfortunately, as our tale reminds us, for this god, people are raw material for it, every bit as much as the bolts of cloth and spools of thread. The clergy, as clergy all too often does, hid behind walls of wealth, power and ritual, convincing the population that gods were necessary and life demanded the occasional death.

This week the prompt word:

Transform

Eliana Lehrer felt ashamed, and, for some reason embarrassed, as she rose from her place along the bench farthest from the soot-tinted windows overlooking Washington Place and the stone and steel canyons of Lower Manhattan and stepped out into corridor that lead to the elevators and stairwell of the Asch Building just ahead of the wave of terrified women.

Until some part of her decided to bypass her brain and took control of her feet, the day in the vast ninth floor sewing room had been as typical as the third slice of bread in a new loaf, nothing but the susurrus of a Saturday’s optimistic fatigue when, without warning, black smoke rose through the vents and rough-wood floorboards.

She allowed the wave of humanity to carry her, at times literally, as the mass of workers broke against the closed doors of the two elevators and, barely slowing, to the end of the corridor and the stairwell where gravity and animal nature solved the equation of fear with a single conclusion: downwards.

Eliana was not like most seventeen-year-old girls in a new country, a part of her insisted on looking on the world as if it were a place to be visited, rather than merely as another inhabitant; as the crowd moved towards the stairs downward, she saw a man on the staircase leading up to the tenth and topmost floor and managed to allow him to pull her from the panicked tide of young women.

The smoke prevented her from seeing where she was being pulled until two flights of stairs had been surmounted and she found herself on the roof of the building, the tar and gravel, an urban sea-shore for the handful of castaways who gasped for oxygen and looked for escape from the flames; across a ten foot chasm, a smaller group stood on adjacent rooftops, arms out-stretched to help make the leap to safety.

Standing at the edge of the building, clutching the man who pulled her from the tide, Eliana heard the sound of death on the wind as women, on the narrow ledge of the ninth floor, flames licking at their legs like a starving wolf, chose to take the impossible chance; a merciful numbness embraced that part of her that knew only life and Eliana Lehrer looked down at the granite-edged sidewalks, the bodies of her friends and co-workers lay, transformed into broken balloons of a wanton god, discarded in anger at their unwillingness to float.