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

Tuesday.

Surely this is the most inviting(-sounding) Day of the Week.

Not the lump of Silly Putty to the forehead that Monday is.

Wednesday tries, but in attempting to appeal to too wide an audience, fails like a soufflé baked on a roller coaster, (“Here it comes…look at it rise!!!! What!?! oh no!!)

(Thursday … surely, Thursday is the fort built in the back corner of your parent’s clothes closet when you were six; the spirit of Thursday never dies, be it in school, (the school week is over tomorrow, why not drink and party all night?) or work life.

Friday and Saturday? Way beyond the scope of this post.

One might even say, Tuesdays are the most clarklike days of the week. Full of promise, yet containing enough in the way of work, duties and responsibilities to avoid any appearance of being besotted by hope or recklessly caught up in the sense of common effort in our day-to-day world, like the teenager convinced (and pressured and seduced into) stealing the parent’s car or going out will lesser-known friends into a part of the night in which risk becomes an intoxicant and running along the edge of the cliff seems like the only thing to do, recently converted to the dream of living for the moment.

(The critical element of this dream, attractive to adolescents of all ages, is that the dream is not a path along which we run, if we dare, leading us to a place we hope to be ourselves. ‘Ourselves’ is a relationship not a place, or even a state of mind. The product of any effort to improve ourselves begins with appreciating how we relate ourselves to the world around us. Before, even, we examine how we relate (and otherwise interact) with the world around us.)

Whoa! HEav vee!

Hey, you know how, after you’ve eaten all the bananas from the milk lake of Rice Krispies and there’s nothing left but a bunch of milk-logged, formerly crisp-and-airy-rice-things? And, being a near adult, you can’t just dump the mess down the sink, so you dutifully spoon the globs of cereal into your mouth, (resisting the unfortunate visual of white blood cells bumper-car racing through blood vessels to hurl themselves at the infection site), when your spoon hits something on the bottom of the bowl. One last slice of sugar encrusted banana.

Makes it all worthwhile, am I right?

(Just in case it doesn’t, here’s a reprint post)

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

So why is it that, of the three personality types, clarks look upon Tuesday as, perhaps, the best of all days of the week? Simple. The weekend-workweek transition day (Monday) has been survived, the focus on achieved (or not) progress day (Wednesday) has not yet occurred and the deceptively desirable end-of-workweek day (Friday) is still a distant dream.

Tuesday is all about optimism and promise. And clarks, well, clarks are nothing if not the embodiment of promise.* No, in our brief discussion this morning, ‘promise’ is decidedly a noun. And the context is social context-free! It is not about breaking a promise, making a promise, promising to better. It (the promise of a clark) is the potential… for (totally fill in the blank).

If anything, the promise inherent in the worldview of a clark is the event horizon of their existence. whoah! (whoah, indeed!) Damn, as often happens, I’ve stumbled into a topic that, like a quiet talk and a cup of coffee at the kitchen counter, the coming day still held back by the castellation in bleached oak of the cabinets bracketing the sink, the outside wall falls into the yard and the world yaws open, ever hungry for human time.

lol

Cliff Notes version of my tantalizing allusion: “…the promise inherent in the worldview of a clark is the event horizon of their existence.” clarks are always searching for something. Being of a rational bent (clarks think, scotts act and rogers feel), the sought-after thing manifests as knowledge/information. clarks are the insatiably curious of the three. The ‘something’ clarks seek is the thing that everyone around them appear to know already and, by tragic miscalculation, clarks assume is the knowledge that makes them, (scotts and rogers) real people. They must have been absent that day, when growing up and being taught about life, ya know. In any event, that is the singularity, the conviction that if they acquire more information, they might discover the secret and become a part of.** Like the nearly-all powerful black hole, we cannot see it directly and so are left with the edge of endless appetite, like golem with a question mark impressed upon our foreheads.

 

 

*  the natural tendency here is to interpret the word ‘promise’ as a verb, which totally changes the spin. That kind of promise is strictly of the domain of the real people, the scotts and the rogers. (“Hey, a promise is a promise, so get some clothes on an we’ll catch some breakfast”  “Yeah, but you promised. I heard you promise. Everyone heard you promise. How can you do such a thing?“)

 

** super-brief Doctrine for New Readers: unlike most of the other personality theories and schema, the Doctrine does not rely on quizzes and surveys, questions about favorite colours or food, likes and dislikes, in order to establish which category a person falls into. This is because, from our viewpoint, our personality ‘types’ are simply the characteristically distinct style of dealing with life, given the world we are experiencing. Ex: I grew up in the reality of the ‘the Outsider’ and I learned and developed the style of interacting that would best advantage me in that context. My tendency to mumble, have poor posture, make creatively eccentric fashion choices, be funny (provided you’re close enough to hear me) and exhibit a sporadic yet wildly original creativity is because that is what is successful when contending with the world as I experience it. For scotts and for rogers, the same applies. Start out as a little baby one in the world of the Predator and I betcha you develop a predilection for quick reflexes, act-before-being-acted-up real fast. It’s about what strategies are appropriate to the character of the world you grow up in, you know, what kind of likes and dislikes, favorite colours or food that increase the odds that you survive and thrive today.

 

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