Month: May 2020 | the Wakefield Doctrine

Six Sentence Story -the Wakefield Doctrine-

May 13, 2020 By clarkscottroger

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

Denise is the host.

The format is to use the prompt word in writing a story of six (and only six) sentences.

This week’s prompt word:

WATCH

“Being the newest hand, the Fourth Watch is yours; the autopilot is set and there’s nothing between us and the Hudson Canyon but the devil and the night-black sea, don’t fall asleep,” the owner and captain of the fishing trawler placed the thick leather-bound book he’d been reading, on the chart table, looked around the bridge with the falsely casual glance of a man watching his wife get dressed and left without another word.

‘How long has it been now…don’t look, you’ll be disappointed,’ the young man straightened up in the chair and, looking out the windows that formed three sides of the wheelhouse, watched as a star touch, as lightly as a five-year-old boy kissing the cheek of a favorite aunt, the far-edge of the flat, dark ocean; with a squeak of worn vinyl triggering a neuromuscular shock that rippled the back of his scalp, he realized he’d dozed off.

The radar screen insisted, with each silent, green sweep around the screen, there was nothing between the boat and the horizon; the light, which minutes before was a bright star reflected in the flat-calm water was now an inverted umbrella of halogen light, illuminating the work deck of another trawler, its wheel house dark, except for a white rectangle in one window.

Over-riding the autopilot, he changed course to pass to the left of the silent vessel, barely ten feet between their respective out-riggers; picking up binoculars, he read the paper taped to the window of the other boat’s wheelhouse, LUKE 12:35-40 written in shaky magic marker letters.

Just before the distance grew to where details were cloaked in the night, the lights on the other ship went out; turning to the chart table, the newest deck hand found the worn-leather bible the owner kept to pass the day at the wheel and read,

“Let your waist be girded and your lamps burning; and you yourselves be like men who wait for their master, when he will return from the wedding, that when he comes and knocks they may open to him immediately. Blessed are those servants whom the master, when he comes, will find watching.”

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: Six Sentence Story, the Wakefield Doctrine

TToT -the Wakefield Doctrine-

May 9, 2020 By clarkscottroger

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

This is the TToT bloghop, hosted every week by Kristi.

So the deal is this: for the enjoyment of identifying with others of like-mind, you are invited to share a ‘list post’ with the focus on the people, places and things that have elicited the feel/emotion/attitude of gratitude in your life. It can be from last week or it could be that time in the third grade when one of your classmates…. you get the idea. Anyway, Lizzi called it the Ten Things of Thankful (some cool kid started calling it the TToT, but their name is lost in the fog of time) and, here we are. Ten is good number. (Stephen Wright joke: “In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.”) But there ain’t no required number. Heck, this place comes equipped with what participants (well, some participants) refer to as the Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules). With that as reference, you cain’t never go wrong.

If that doesn’t make you feel comfortable with the non-judgemental and supportive atmosphere that Kristi and the hostinae create here each week, keep reading. (lol yep, and I haven’t been blocked yet!)

1) Phyllis ↓

(the photo at the top of the post? Phyllis and Una. If you look you can see Phyllis in Una’s eyes. If you see the picture you are seeing the trust and love both are gifted with.)

2) Una ↑

3) the Wakefield Doctrine A perspective on the world around us and the people who make it up. Three perspectives, in point of fact, which we, all of us, are heir to and, at an early age (say, one to two and three-quarters) becomes our predominant reality. What separates the Wakefield Doctrine from other personality systems is, that in order to establish a person’s predominant worldview, we do not use questionnaires, surveys or ‘which would you rather…’; we observe the other person. With a sufficient understanding of the three perspectives (that of the: Outsider(clarks), the Predator(scotts) and the Herd Members(rogers) we simply identify which reality makes the most sense based on (the) person’s attitude, reactions, behaviors and (whether or not they laugh or get mad when they learn what we’re up to). What others might call inherited traits, social tropisms of EHJiR-type behavior, the Doctrine says, ‘Well there, it looks like someone grew up and developed their social strategies in a world where: everything is apart from/the world is full of surprising dangers and satisfying rewards/the universe is quantifiable and there is one Right Way.

You know, like that. Have fun ‘out there’. (lol). oh…oh! almost forgot. You learn the Doctrine well-enough to identify the clarks, scotts and rogers in your world? you might find it difficult (as in: impossible) to not see the clarks, scotts and rogers in your world. just sayin.)

4) the Hobbomock Chronicles. You might want to check back later, there’s a chance I’ll have the next chapter up.

5) Social Isolation and such… finally! Do you have any idea how many time I heard (No, Mimi, Denise no fair shouting out the answer) my parents say, “Get your hand down from your face, how can anyone be expected to understand what you’re saying?” lol. Hello State-required face-mask! Not to make light of a very serious situation, but, dude(s)! We’ve been in training for this for our entire lifes. No standing closer than six feet? aww geez, no, not that!

6) the internet and the convenient availability of a remarkable variety of music (in time and taste). See videos 1 & 2

7) Technology and that presentation in Music video #3… man, how much more fun is it to watch the notes, along with hear them. Seriously, I actually lol’d at a couple of points, in particular at minute 08:00

8) THIS SPACE AVAILABLE

9) Nothing yet on the garden. Probably plant something this weekend (or next). Mushroom, maybe. The problem with the garden are the pine trees. There is less than three hours of direct sunlight on the letters. …this just in (at 8:14 am Saturday) it is approximately 38 degrees. Now there’s an example of the perfect hypograt. It is 38 degrees.

10) Secret Rule 1.3 From the Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules) “[I]ts not so much how many items there are on your list, it is the (nearing) completion of said list that qualifies for a place in the list.”

music:

imo? there’s no way you can’t enjoy this song. kinda represents the early days of the mutation of country music.

How many 1980s pop/rock songs will make use of the euphonious word: ‘moot’?!! Rick does and it totally works.

Those are the notes making up the circumference of the circle with, I assume, the measure being counted off at the top of the circle. Really a lot of fun! Be sure to go full screen… you will see the points that will surely make you l ol

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

Six Sentence Story -the Wakefield Doctrine-

May 6, 2020 By clarkscottroger

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

This is the Six Sentence Story bloghop

It is available, (for participation in), to all who would write a story, employing the prompt word, provide it is precisely six sentences in total length.

Denise is the host.

This week’s prompt word:

GULF

Claiming the center of Hannah’s rearview mirror like a B-movie girl jumping out of a cake, Alexandra Devon exhibited the after-effects of their successful listing presentation, i.e. more jumping and hand-waving than ordinarily required to unlock the door of her townhouse.

Hannah smiled into the mirror and drove out of the parking lot, at exactly the posted five miles-per-hour; where Alex was outgoing and attractively-confident, Hannah was creatively analytical, in other words, the one who’s name might escape you, got more serene and the one you’ll never forget, threw a party.

As always must happen, at least in a mostly binary, right-wrong world, the part-time real estate agent/full-time high school history teacher confronted a choice: go straight home or not; hearing the metronomic-ticking of the turn signal, she reminded herself, with a private laugh, that she would not live forever.

Turning left, she headed towards the beach and it’s pre-Labor Day crowds; although her home offered views of the water, it lacked the tactile manifestation of the most fundamental experiences of human life in a physical earth, the transition from dry land to dark ocean.

Leaving her practical mind under a pile of marketing brochures in the back seat, Hannah walked across the parking lot, drawn to the sound of the waves crashing on the far-side of the dunes; solid asphalt became shifting beachsand as the afternoon sun settled quietly on her bare shoulders.

The iodine scent of dry seaweed mixed with smell of sunblock and a distant hibachi; Hannah felt the gulf between herself and the world of people disappear, if only for a summer moment.

https://youtu.be/tTte9oYzrwQ

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: Six Sentence Story, the Wakefield Doctrine

Monday Morning Musings* -the Wakefield Doctrine- (*…because nothing says, ‘Here, read this. I wrote it years ago’, like alliteration**)

May 4, 2020 By clarkscottroger

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

Lets do a reprint post. This one is from May of 2013

(Here is where I usually Tom Sawyer myself into writing an actual, not a reprint (at least to the extent that we all agree that everything, after puberty/adolescence (puberty/adolescence motto: You remember how, when you were four or five years old, you were sure that you were meant to be: an astronaut, a ballerina, a cowboy, a doctor, a mother, the President, …an astronaut? You will have all of what you need for an insane few teenage years to achieve that. Try to keep it in mind.)

So, I see the post below and I smile. I think to myself, I think, ‘Man! Did you really write these every day of the week?’ Of course, the answer is: ‘Yes, yes, he did.’ I will avoid the temptation of getting all Master Po on this thing and leave it to you to remember the inference and/or look it up. In any event, this is good excerise (lol…. I misspelled exercise…. the spellcheck insisted on ‘Excretes’. I laughed. The universe can be a funny thing.)

It’s good to see that the principles of the Wakefield Doctrine have remained as they were since we started writing this blog. A couple of developments, refinements, if you will, have enhanced the usefulness of our little personality theory. The Everything Rule. This Rule reminds us that, as far as the Doctrine is concerned, there is nothing that is exclusive to one of the three worldviews. There is no ‘thats something only a scott would do’ or ‘working at the profession is exclusively for rogers‘. This (Everything Rule) is not to imply that there are no distinctions among the three personality types of the Wakefield Doctrine. What it does do is remind us that we all live in what amounts to a personal reality. A common world. A personal reality. So, of course a clark can be a cop and a scott might be an accountant or a roger a defense attorney. Where the Everything Rule is most helpful is to require us to consider how these professions (or likes/dislikes, avocations/ hobbies, whatever) manifest in the world of the person we are considering.

Enough of the Everything Rule. Lets read the reprint

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

Shit.

Reluctant decision, after forced-into-decision, followed by lesser-of-two-evils decisions and there you are, stuck in your seat in class with nothing more on your desktop than a folder (one of those drugstore binders with the little square windows built into the covers (that rectangular window is created with a clear material that you know must be the ‘plasticene’ that the Beatles sang about) and inside the square window are the words: ‘the Wakefield Doctrine (an alternate perspective on personality and personality types)’ and when you open the cover (an improbable pale blue-greenish color) you see one page with the words. ‘The purpose of this paper….’ (you know, the weird thing is not that you have not completed the assignment that you know you are capable of completing, no the weird thing is that you are feeling self-conscious…in advance of the words, “Mr Clark…. your Report, please’)

(ahem,,,,) the purpose of this Post is…

In the week coming, we will:

return to the Comment/Question posed by Amy (Adorable Chaos) that asked what our personality theory had to offer her (…being beset on all sides by a scott and/or a scott with a little faux pack of rogers),

describe our first Thursday Wakefield Doctrine AP Study Hour (and announce the time of this week’s Hour)

talk about the Wakefield Doctrine book

write 2 participatory Posts: one tomorrow on Tuesday ( Twisted Mix-tape Tuesday hosted by Jen and Kristi ) and FTSF ( the tilt ‘n whirl of blog hops presented by our Four Sistas: Janine and Kate and Stephanie and Dawn )

and finish this Post… which while it may not seem important, I have come to believe, courtesy of DownSpring Cyndi, that there are ‘Read-blogs-days’ of the week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday), so I damn well better find a way to provide you, my Monday Readers, with a little more in content than a catchy Title and a numbered bullet list.

The Wakefield Doctrine says this: we all experience the world in what you might call a personal reality (we call it a ‘worldview’). Now this idea of a personal reality is nothing radical, no ability to fly… no invisibility (well, except for clarks) and no unicorns ( have you read the description of the worldview of scotts?! unicorns? nooo sorry, all chased off or eaten).
Anyway.
Personal reality is simply meant to designate character of the world as we experience it, the ‘inside view’, if you will. We are all born with the potential to experience three distinctly characteristic realities: the world of the Outsider (clarks), the reality of the Predator (scotts) and the life of the Herd Member (rogers). At an early age, we ‘pick’ one of these three and grow and mature, responding and reacting and developing traits, strategies and behaviors appropriate to the worldview we inhabit. clarks are very creative because they see everything from a distance, not conditioned or indoctrinated into ‘the right way’, scotts are confident to a fault, simply because in order to survive as a predator time spent in introspection is time spent being eaten by a larger scott …and rogers, they make such ‘good’ managers because they know that everyone and everything will be so much better once they understand ‘the Proper Way’.

So, for the Wakefield Doctrine, personality types are not habitual ways of responding to situations in life, personality types are reflections of the world as the person experiences it.

The big thing for those looking to use the Wakefield Doctrine as a way of understanding the behavior of the people in their lives is that, while we all inhabit one of the three worldviews described here, we never lose the capacity to see the world ‘as do the other two types’ do. In other words, I am a clark, but somewhere within is everything I would need to live successfully in the worldview of a scott….or a roger. Herein lies the key to the Wakefield Doctrine being a tool for self-improving yourself.
Quick example: DownSpring Cyndi. A clark. We all know that you can spot a clark at family reunions ’cause they are the ones behind the camera. Show me people at a get together where some one whips out a camera and I will show you the clark…they are ones that volunteer to take the photos. In any event, clarks hate to have their pictures taken (and they are not wild about being tape recorded). Cyndi has started to do a series of video Posts. They aren’t just good. They are amazing. I say this because as you watch them, you are not seeing a clark ‘toughing it out’ enduring the fear and revulsion of being on ‘film’. You are seeing a clark using a portion of (her) scottian aspect. (scotts, as we all know, loves the spotlight, they are natural performers.) Cyndi has managed to access that aspect of herself (remember, we always retain the abilities to experience the world as do ‘the other two’). How cool is that? Example: Video Post

Enough. It’s Monday and the alphabet, like a fuse has ticked itself down to clark…. time to “hit that streets a- runnin’ “

** nah, just wanted to use the word ‘alliteration

now for some music to ease into the week ahead (nothing like so seamless, 70s horns and vocals

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

TToT -the Wakefield Doctrine-

May 3, 2020 By clarkscottroger

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

This is the Ten Things of Thankful (TToT) bloghop. Kristi is our host. She invites one (and all) to read, comment and, if so inclined, contribute a post that shares the occasion of people, places and things that elicit the sense (and experience) of gratitude. (PS it’s a lot more fun than I’m making it sound.*) You really should link up (at Kristi’s blog).

So, here’s the deal, lest there’s a reader who might be thinking, ‘Oh, that’s, like, one of those Gratitude blog things, where people write about rainbows and how everything is perfect.’ One word: do you know where you are?! Have you read anything else in this this blog? lol

I kid the new Reader. In all seriousness, this TToT is an enduring virtual community and, as such, is an example of the unique good that is inherent in the virtual world. It is, imo, a genuinely new thing in the world. Sure, you could have friends from far away, (“Your party has been reached. Please deposit seventy-five cents for the first five minutes.” or “Are you keeping an eye on the time, it may be evening hours, but the long-distance rate is...”) and you could even send photos from vacations and birthdays and other forms of frozen time. But this place, the virtual world in general and the blogosphere in particular, is different. It is real. And before someone thinks, ‘Yeah, sure for a something on my computer screen or phone, its fairly real.’ I will say, when you were seven-years-old and you got the card from your favorite aunt (who lived visit-maybe-every-five-years away) and you look at the ten dollar bill** in the card, how real was your aunt? No, it wasn’t because of the money, (well, not exclusively), but because with that gift, your day was altered even more than the gifts from the people who handed you presents. For a short time, you would include a person you might not have seen for years in your everyday world. Later in the day, or maybe the next day, when you got to your friend’s house, the topic of conversation was all about the present. “Hey! My aunt send me money, lets figure out what I should buy!”

So, when it comes to bloghops like this here TToT here, you not only have the opportunity to share things with people you know, you get to share in (a glimpse) of another reality. Very cool.

1) Una photo above (the one of the left***)

2) Phyllis photo above (the other one)

3) Time of year/season. below is a Before photo of Una’s garden 2020

4) Place/venue/group of friends with whom I can think out loud. See intro comments and Item 6

5) Six Sentence Story this is Denise’s contribution to the on-going effort to learn to write better. (I speak only for myself. One read of any of the other contributions to the ‘hop will make clear why I hang out there. Go there and you’ll have the pleasure of reading some of the best flash fiction. And, therefore, for me, the place to try and figure out how it’s done.)

6) Hobbomock Chronicles. Speaking of writing and hanging out with friends, Episode Sixteen is next up. Maybe later today, the first of the coming week. I’m still recovering from a bout of ‘This is a book I’m trying to write.’ The thing with my writing, at least at this stage, is that I can’t think about whether it (the story) is correct (in a structural sense). Every now and then I give in to the urge to try to learn (about writing fiction). While I suspect I absorb something each time I indulge, the conflict between what I read and what I think I’m doing (with my writing) produces in me a conviction that ‘You can’t do this!’ The only cure is time to forget about whether or not I’m creating a solid narrative for the protagonist and get back to writing what the characters tell me is happening to them.

7) Una’s Garden. Soil turned over. Nothing planted yet.

8) THIS SPACE AVAILABLE Anyone out there, on the fence, about participating, this your chance. Send me, (via comments below) your favorite (or the one you’re least sure of) and I will clear this space and paste it right here, complete with whatever attributions you choose to send with the Item. Try it, can’t hurt.

9) something, something

10) SR 1.3 From the Book of Secret Rules, (aka the Secret Book of Rules) ‘The approach of the end of a list is, in and of itself, a cause for celebration. Celebration is, normally, an activity reserved to mark, recall and otherwise commemorate, “Look! I finished!” And so, with a list of grats. That it something to feel grateful for. Go ahead, the Book say, ‘Darn right it’s an Item!’

* well, the short explanation is, ‘I’m a clark‘

** err, remember the reference time frame for the writer, we’re not talking ‘way back in the 80s’

*** surely one of my favorite form-jokes

music