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

This is the TToT. Hosted by Kristi each and every weekend (even those with two Saturdays)

Yes, according to what I read, the subtitle this week is accurate. The ‘2000s’ are, in fact, the Third Millennium Anno Domini. Got to be making those last New Year’s Resolutions a bit more compelling, no?

To the business at hand. This is the Ten Things of Thankful (TToT) bloghop. The more…traditional exegesis is down there, at the bottom of this page, above the thumbnails of the TToT participants.

I will submit the items (with no claim to coherency) below as the people, places and things that cause and otherwise elicit a feeling of gratitude.

1) Una: Lying, comfortable in the bedroom, with the blinds drawn, the AC on ’11’ and my lower legs as an apostrophe, reminding her, (unnecessarily), that I have her back.

2) Phyllis: reading in bed next to Una. ’cause what better demonstration of the safety of the pack than that?

3) For a chrono-calenderistic eclipse today. Far more rare than the Tuesday-that-would-be-Monday that follows the majority of Chamber of Commerce endorsed three-day weekends, today is a Friday-that-would-be-Saturday. The procession effect, (weekday advancing into weekend), is surely more powerful than the more ordinary, weekday-disguised-as-another-weekday. It is an occurrence noted in the Wakefield Doctrine as ‘the day a clark might feel like a scott.‘ This, because Saturdays are most scottian of days-of-the-week. Fridays? Open to all, but the clarklike imprimatur is stamped large by the volume of hope that the Outsider people invest in the end of the workweek, against the promise of the weekend.

4) the Wakefield Doctrine. Why? Well, on this particular occasion, I am grateful because I know that we are in the highest holiday for the scottian people of the world. A day manifested (in fifty percent of the world’s hemispheres) by: weather suitable to minimal clothing and/or outdoor sports, food that involves open-flame cooking and, speaking of which, ….fireworks! Loud/surprising/larger-than-safe-smaller-than-some-military-grade-ordinance…. fireworks. If, for example, I were to say, ‘Christmas’, most of us will smile at the mental image of a kindly, older, charitable gentleman. When we say Fourth of July, you are within your rights to conjure a scene: water-skiing young men with cans of Kingsford charcoal lighter fluid passing close enough to shore to try and help start the charcoal fires; young women collecting admirers like a grain of steroid in an over-sized oyster asking, with all sincerity, ‘Is this bikini too big?’  July 4th remains the most scottian of holidays. No matter what your age, religious beliefs, cultural imperatives or desire to be left alone to enjoy your book in peace.

5) Dead-Cedar Tree Branch Trelli (or trelliseseses) for the rose bush at the corner of the deck.

6) Hey, as mistletoe is to Christmas and crayon-on-construction-paper turkeys are to Thanksgiving, surely a field of thistle might be considered the appropriate vegetation for the Fourth (“Want to bet I can run through them without getting stuck? You’re on…gimme some firecrackers.”)

7) Pat Brockett for the number of times she uses a word I need to look up. Not as simple as it sounds. This is not a case of projectile-scrabble playing; she finds a word, appropriate, (if not uncommon), perfect to the context and subject matter. Surely the highest form of fun for clarks and others.

8) Six Sentence Story bloghop. For stories that read like the box in the back of a childhood closet, full of model car parts, comic-books-missing-covers and American International movies at the Saturday matinee.

9) THIS SPACE AVAILABLE. (Send in your trail Grats. If’n ya got ’em.)

10) Secret Rule 1.3 From the Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules) which infers the implication that ‘the process is the product.’

music vids

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