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

hey, normally we’d be all ‘shit-!-what-the-heck-am-I-gonna-do-?-it’s-Six-Sentence-Story-day-and-I-gots-nothin’ on this Wednesday morning. We prefer to have the Six posted on Six Sentence Story Eve. Takes the ‘pressure’ off our brains.

But, as luck would have it, our writing-friend Misky (from Six Sentence Story and the Unicorn Challenge) wrote herself a Comment that got us thinkin’ (ikr? a clark…thinking. knock us over with a feather!)

hey! that reinforces what it was we expressed in our Reply!

Wakefield Doctrine:  “…been amphetamine-puppy, which is not, in and of itself a bad thing but we fear over-repeating ourselfs…”

(to) Misky’s Comment:  >abhor being the center of attention but will not tolerate being ignored’.< Correct. Almost always.

So, here’s the thing: as a clark our primary fear* is scrutiny. So we don’t want to faux pas ourselves by repeating too many things about the Doctrine.

But, what the hell. We just spent fifteen minutes on the footnote below to be taken with a grain of wisdom¹

clarks think, scotts act. rogers feel.  the Doctrine is for you, not them. when it comes to learning the Wakefield Doctrine, you can’t get it wrong (and finally) one of our favorite ways to spot the clark… ask the question: ‘How much is Two plus Two?’

* New Readers? Yes. There is a symmetry to the Doctrine. In this particular instance one would be safe to bullet-point the three primal fears (of):

• clarks (the Outsider) Scrutiny. Sure we could go into a long, detailed, ‘sure-it-sounds-right-to-this-clark’ definition of the term. but we won’t
• scotts (the Predator) Randomness. Fun story from the early days of the blog: Was out driving around one Saturday Night with Friend-of-the-Doctrine Glenn. We said, “The thing about clarks is that pretty much nothing would surprise us.” to which Glenn observed, “What the fuck are you talking about?” We said, “Well, tomorrow morning when we wake up and head out into the world, if it turns out that the sky actually is purple with pink polla-dots, we’ll just shrug and say, “OK.” To which Glenn said, “That would make me crazy. As a scott (and a Predator) the world not only has to be consistent, but it has to make sense. Day-to-Day ya know?”
• rogers (the Herd Member) Social Disassociation.  “Did you hear someone?” (looking around the room which could be a classroom or a factory floor or the checkout line at Seven Twelve) there is a well-dressed person waving their arms in the air, mouths all silent-filmy… kinda getting mad) “No. Why? Did you hear someone?” (The well-dressed human shows signs of shrinking into a corner of abject fear)

1) Damn. What they say about ‘Write enough words and the chimpanzees will laugh is true! We just stumbled on that most rare of artifacts from the reality of the Herd Member (rogers) the ‘rogerian expression’. First this link will take you to the Page on rogers. we have a list of all rogerian expressions extant  But today! Big shoutout to Misky (for inspiring this way-longer-than-we-have-time-for post) for the ‘ taken with a grain of wisdom’

speaking of repetition