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TToT -the Wakefield Doctrine- “…and then there were seven.”

August 4, 2018 By

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.

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TToT -the Wakefield Doctrine-

July 14, 2018 By

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

…Late start.

Thanks to Kristi for her continuing efforts to untangle the ‘Hydra of html’ that has been loosed upon her by the dark god, Inlinkz. (visual: wading through coiling serpentine shapes, needle-teeth scything the air with toxic whispers, brown-cardboard packing boxes held overhead, very much 1940s jungle thriller…’cept in the dry, high-mountain region of the country and wards-full of friends, none of whom will get all bug-eyed, muttering something about ‘bad ju ju‘ and run off down the suburban street.) Thanks Kristi!

Well… that certainly puts a modicum of pressure on this here list of Ten Things of Thankful, doan it?

1) Una:  for being my role model.

2) Phyllis: for being my enabler (in a good way…mostly)

3) the Wakefield Doctrine: for sine qua non(ing) me in this realm.

4) the Writers Club: something new(ish) (you know I’m a clark, right? welll what’s more natural than my wanting to start a club?  (yeah… that’s the non-verbal sound I made lol)

5) (it’s true, though. It will be a club and not a group… (first qualification for applicants! sense the difference in those two: club v group)

6) The internet and it’s associated technology: it widens the world and allows us all to ‘get a whole new group of everyone’*.

7) Lizzi St. Claire (nee Lewis)  talk about your sine qua!  She created this place in the ‘sphere. Not because it would become a cool place for people of good intent to gather and allow identification among very different lives to take place. No, she did it because…. And she did it alone. At the beginning time, when the Ten Things were simply a recurring theme among the posts in her blog. Whether anyone read it or not. Very cool.

8) THIS SPACE AVAILABLE (Anyone out there reading and really would like to be writing (a TToT post) but …not…quite….ready. Try this: send in your Item of Thankful as a comment (with whatever attribution you prefer**) and I’ll post it here.

9) Sunday Supplement:

So, about this Writers Club.  My interest in writing is attributable to my decision to participate in the blogging community. It is, imo, a literal world or a literary world…or maybe a world of the written word. Of course, not that everyone in the blogosphere is obsessed writing. They are as good as is necessary to their enjoyment of this place. Speaking for myself, from the moment I hit ‘Publish’ on my first Doctrine post, I knew I’d never stop playing catch-up, in terms of my skills against the demands of my ambitions.

Anyway. The idea of having a ‘place’ where different people can try different things, writingistically-speaking strikes me as a good thing. We can share ideas, problems tricks and successes as we follow whatever our path in this world of imagination and ideas takes us. So I set up a site but I need to get it organized so that we have designated common areas and each of us can set up projects that we might want to try. I’m using ‘Pages’ for this, cause we can make them ‘private’. More to follow.

Oh, yeah, that and write a YA mystery series by the name of ‘The Hobbomock Chronicles’. So if you’re up for some interesting times in a tiny corner of the virtual world, let me know.

10) Secret Rule 1.3 Go ahead, ask.  (I dare ya, I double dare ya.)

 

(footnotes)

 

* early in my days here in the virtual world, when everything was new and therefore risky, my fear would sometimes manifest itself in the most pedestrian of ways. “Hey, be careful clark… you’re getting kinda out there. If you don’t watch out you’re gonna get everyone mad at  you.” I am totally grateful for the thought that followed, “Well, then, I guess I’ll just need to get another set of everyone“.

** of course I know how you feel! This is the Wakefield Doctrine!

 

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Monday -the Wakefield Doctrine-

April 23, 2018 By

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

No, not an effort to avoid the ‘real’ writing of the day! Just something Cynthia (or maybe it was Denise... possibly Pat) said in a comment yesterday.

Just that certain FOTD* have, in recent ‘conversations, mentioned how music, although subject to ‘the Everything Rule’**, nevertheless evidences a certain simpatico among members of the same personality types.***

So, here are two tunes for two very different moods likely to be encountered by the clarks today as we encounter, deal with and do what we gotta do with that world ‘out there’.

And, since all work and no play makes any lifeform dull, (yes, even clarks) we have this to play at whichever end of the day you choose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDpYBT0XyvA

 

 

*Friends of The Doctrine

** ‘the Everything Rule’ states: ‘everyone does everything, at one time or another’. What it means is: while each of the three worldviews have an inherent affinity for certain types of music, styles in fashion, professions and trades, cuisines and vacation milieu, no worldview has exclusive domain on anything.

Sure, scotts do well as police officers and surgeons and rogers produce examples of the epitome in the field of CPA, fashion co-ordinator and high school teachers and clarks…well, whatever it was that had the shortest line in gym full of registration tables….lol  What we’re saying is that a scott could be (and surely there are some) a CPA and a clark could be a frontman in a band and rogers could be rodeo stars. The interesting thing here is how, if we look closely, each of the three worldviews manifest their ‘thing’ in a manner reflective of their respective worldviews.

A scott as a policeman. Easy. They’re really good at being cops. The job (for them) entails being out among the general public, encouraged to drive fast, chase and capture people and, wherever possible make a lot of noise doing it. But a clark can be a cop as can a roger. Where do you think the Commissioner of police comes from? Or the cops turned successful authors?  lol

*** Our three personality types:

  1. clarks (the Outsider) poor posture, incredibly witty (when they can be heard),
  2. scotts (the Predator) active and move quickly, plan and reflect as little as possible
  3. rogers (the Herd Member) precise and exact, living by the rules, happy to share them

 

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TToT -the Wakefield Doctrine- “…a tale of parts and the whole.”

April 14, 2018 By

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

‘Black dog on a milk chocolate couch with a nougat quilt’ (Jigsaw that, Phyllis)
(Landscape orientation)
Una is sitting in the middle of a leather upholstered loveseat that is in backed-up to the front picture window in our living room. The window itself is not in the photo. The effects (of the location) and the wear on the loveseat’s location are.
The top edge of the back of the couch are washed out by the light coming through the un-seen window. The cushions of backrest nearest the camera are indented and crushed out of shape, as if a weight had been placed on the top of cushions. Looks to be a weight of about fifty-four pounds, squeezing the top edge down to the middle of (the cushion).
Una is sitting facing the camera but looking to her left (the camera’s right). Given that the only thing to Una’s left is the crushed back cushion and the picture window, it would appear that she is thinking that there is something outside that requires barking at.
Una is sitting in the classic sphinx position (two front paws straight out in front of her, hind legs bent and folded in the back and her head aloft and alert. Her snout is point towards the camera and, as we mentioned, her eyes are looking to her side and we only just noticing, one of her ears is aimed in the direction of her eyes. No, seriously. Her right ear if a slightly-rounded black triangle, we can see just a hint of lighter colored hair in her inner ear. But her left ear is a wedge shape. The open part of her, at right angles to us appears a flat plane and the wedge is the concavity of her outer ear.
Her ears are independently aimable.
As implied in the title, the leather is a soft, milk chocolate and the comforter thats draped over the back is like, a light butterscotch. An anemic yellow, if there is such a color.

Given the subtitle that showed up this morning, experience has taught me to keep it moving. Hey! Josie, thanks for the invite and keepin the old clubhouse all ready and available. We all appreciate it.

Item (1) the Wakefield Doctrine. ’cause, well, sine qua, right?

Item (2) the virtual world. it’s not like the Doctrine wouldn’t exist without it. because there was a ‘theory of clarks, scotts and rogers‘ from, like 1984. it’s just that I get to meet so many more people ‘in here’ than I would ‘out there’1 And, with the numbers, the odds of meeting remarkably talented and caring people (not always qualities found in the same person) increases, exhibitiously.*

Item (3) grateful for the fact that those who come here more than once, on purpose, are those possessed of the kind of mind that enjoys the occasional ms from more far-flung realities.

Item (4) go back… three is/was a double

Item (5) the underlying theme today: self improving oneself and 15andmeowing. (Wait! This will make sen…. well, wait anyway). We all know that the Wakefield Doctrine is, among other things, a particularly useful tool for self-improvement. (Hint: while we all live in one and only one of the three characteristic worldviews, i.e. Outsider, Predator and Herd Member, we retain the potential of the other two. Thats not to say that I can pass for a roger just because I feel like it. That is to say that sometimes, under duress, I will look like a scott in how I react to a situation, or as if I were a roger. What all this means is that I already have within me the ‘improvements’ that I seek.)

(…ok, I’m getting to it.) So 15andmeowing, on one of her posts a while ago, had a link to one of those online jigsaw puzzle sites. Kinda fun. She mentioned her time (to complete the puzzle)  uh oh.… so, naturally2 I tried again. And, equally naturally, I found a site and started playing. I mentioned this to Phyllis (Item (7)) and she started to play as well. She immediately became better at the game than I was. I thought, not surprisingly, ‘What does the Doctrine say about this?’3

Anyway… the self-improvement part. I find that when I’m trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle, whenever I just move pieces together, without thinking, I am very much quicker. The lesson? Don’t think, trust the self. aka, ‘get out of your own way’.**

Item (6) Una. My role model. To live and act in the here and now.

Item (7) Phyllis. A roger with a significant secondary clarklike aspect.

Item (8) THIS SPACE AVAILABLE! (Now, this is usually meant as an option for anyone not yet ready to post a full-on TToT but would like to get their electronic toes wet…. (eww some how creepier than I would have thought).

In any event we have a Commentation situation developing with our hostinae, Josie. Who hasn’t felt that sinking feeling after writing one damn fine comment and seeing some lame-ass computer generated message about how ‘You can’t do that’. Josie emailed her comment, which we are proud to present, uncut, unedited, in its entirety, in the our little BLOCKQUOTE Theatre.  (Be sure to get over to and make sure she knows we got her back, commentistically-speaking.)

Thanks, it is my pleasure to be able to provide a place where we can meet up and exchange our thoughts on gratitude each week, it must be one of the most positive web addresses that there is!

I love stopping by your blog, it is always an experience in another reality that challenges my mind to keep up and makes me smile.  I suspect that at times you are smiling as you write and annotate too!

This is such a beautiful photo of Una, perfect blend of colors for us to see her well, and you are right about dogs (and cats) teaching us to live in the now, not stressing about yesterday or tomorrow, accepting life as it comes, and accepting us with all our faults and flaws… that’s a big one, something people find much harder to do!

The virtual world is my favorite place to hang out, all my friends live there, and what an eclectic bunch it is!  I think that’s the fascination and satisfaction of the experience… meeting people in far-flung places and discovering that we are more alike than different. 

The Doctrine is a very cool thing that is indeed useful in putting things in perspective. I loved the commentary on Clarks and puzzles… right on target.  We really can’t just take anything at face value and the boring order of routine, so it takes us longer as we toy with possibilities.  Finding new apps to try and to share is one of the things I love about the Internet. We get to try new things and improve skills on old ones.  Who would have thought we’d one day be doing jigsaw puzzles online or creating pottery late at night as Zoe and I sometimes do with the pottery app she found.  It’s all fun, and it’s all a step toward self-improvement, as is the efforts we put into our writing.   I also play “Scrabble” much better now than I did when I first started on Words with Friends, it’s great for exercising my fuzzy brain.

As always, I smile when you refer to the infamous BOSR or SBOR in your posts. It takes me back to a time when SSS was quite a social hangout and the drive to come up with that tenth item was strong enough to inspire creative ways to accomplish same.  I think all facets of life should have BOSR’s that we can add to and imiplement as needed.  If there must be rules, why must they be inflexible?  Hence my determination that “my blog… my rules” and I shall use an ex word for the X post in the A-Z Challenge.

Thank you for faithfully sharing here each week and giving us things to think about, you are an original and I like that a lot!

Item (9) The Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules) which states, in part, ‘…a participant, cognizant of and amendable to the imposition of the rules pertaining to presenting a List of Ten Things of Thankful, may [p]rovided the words ‘Thankful’ (substitutions of grat, gratitude or ‘landscape orientation’ permitted) in said list, can use pretty much anything that wanders into their awareness, like a child into their parent’s bedroom at midnight…op cit, ibis. (ed. 2018)’

Item (10) Secret Rule 1.3

 

1) hey! think you might be a clark but not sure? (and really crossin your fingers…please come out scott or…roger) try this: you wake up in the morning and the world takes shape around you and you think, ‘ok we can do this thing… lets get out there and deal with the world’ good morning, clark!

2)  not to say that only those of us from Y Chromia see the mention of a completion time as red a flag. it’s just that part of my genetic code (‘AGCTGGCAT’, to be precise) lol says ‘You better do better than that!’

3) rogers will always be better at jigsaw puzzles than clarks (and scotts) because the reality that they (rogers) exist in is a reality in which everything is related. If everything is already related then all they need to do (playing a jigsaw) is remember how the pieces go today. A clark, on the other hand, sees that parts all spread out on the screen and tries to use the parts to create a picture.

*  my modest attempt at a rogerian expression

** kinda advice for clarks, as opposed to rogers and scotts, ya know?


Music Vid

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TToT -the Wakefield Doctrine-

March 31, 2018 By

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

Una (world traveler) looks out from her private (and portable) cabin during a layover in Frankfort.’

A quiet sort of TToT post this week. A lot of the (potential) Grat Items piling up in my head are, in fact, of ‘the world virtual’. Prompted in no small part by the FTSF ‘hop of yesterday. It gave us licence1 to spend some time in the past, more specifically, the past here in the ‘sphere. Which is kinda where my head is at this morning. The blog post in question is from 2009. It was like, all of the fifth month I’d been writing this blog, but for reasons I’m just beginning to understand, it stands out in my memory. Phyllis asked something about the post, along the lines of how ‘everyone’ reacted. That triggered a total flashback episode, (do your own wavy screen), of the very early days, not something a clark is not naturally predisposed to do. Of course, the reason I started a blog was the Wakefield Doctrine.2 In any event, I think that the post was one of the thresholds necessary for me to cross that I might continue to write; like a clark.

So, I will get all referential3 and list what I remember as the path (or, like an adult returning to a childhood home town, I’ll point and insist (convincingly, it is hoped) that promontory, from which I jumped into ocean, was much higher than it appearss or that the walk to my old elementary school only looks like a single, sidewalked block.)

The thing about this blog, (and me and the internet), is that it was all driven by the Wakefield Doctrine. I was talking to a young clark yesterday, which is a treat (like getting the next-the-last-spelling-word correct) and I recounted an Easter story from my past that I often relate to other clarks. (The thing about the story is that, while everyone feels sympathetic, a clark will respond on a visceral level.) It was the Easter Egg hunt story.**

Okay, I jumped my formatting a bit. So, let’s try to get things back on track. So I wrote blogs ’bout every day in the first few years and, in the name of getting the Doctrine in as many people as possible, I got on ‘the Facebook’. Thats when I began to meet the remarkable people who I now count as friends. The aforementioned Finish the Sentence Friday bloghop was the first of my active participation with people in the virtual world. So, here’s one of my favorite photos5

So the rest is the present. I’ve been totally lucky in encountering only people of good intent. Interesting, when I first ventured out, I was all, ‘Lets see them try to attack and/or make fun of me and this Wakefield Doctrine.’ The thing was, they never showed up. I was, for a while, all, ‘Oh man! I’ve got to get better exposure. No one is challenging my on the efficacy or effectiveness of the Doctrine. I’m failing in my mission.’ Slowly, (am a clark, remember?) I realized that it is possible to hang out with cool people without the occasional ‘what the hell are you doing here, you don’t belong.’

Lets close this out. Una, she totally gets her own footnote.

 

 

  1. the founderess of this very bloghop, Lizzi Lewis who lives in the future, (well, relative to us, here in the States, she’s at least five hours ahead; if you get a text from the UK cap-lettering that there are Four Horsemen heading east, you’d do well to back up those old posts and clear your browser history) and in Great Britain. A typically un-assuming village by the name of East Hollandaise o’er Hardtack, in the Medium Low Counties (Village motto: ‘articles?! we don’t need any articles, any freshman at university could tell ‘ye that!’)
  2. call it the ‘sine qua non’ (yeah, go ahead, this is the Doctrine where, as Humpty Dumpty reminds us, words are our friends.) Or, if so inclined, get tangled* in the debate that this is a Doctrine blog or merely my blog about the Doctrine. I’d be willing to take either side.
  3. sometimes it seems like we’re all, ‘rogers are a pain in the neck’, but, as we know (if, that is, we’ve been doing our Wakefield Doctrine study) if it weren’t for rogers we’d live in a world without stable cultures, electronic devices, over-bearing laws and a judicial system. We’d totally be trying to remember how the ‘8 times table’ goes and hoping that the scottian designer of the airliner we’re riding in didn’t just spot the new intern and left the backup safety design to the clark who really thinks that couches and a bathroom for every passenger makes sense for transcontinental travel. In any event, rogers do this thing called a rogerian expression where they take a word and use in a way at once improper and totally amusing. Here click this to the page that includes a list of rogerian expressions.
  4. I am grateful for this story. It (now) elicits a feeling, an actual emotional feeling (lol) for my fellow clarks. Sure, I identify with clarks and see, in how they relate themselves to the world around them, myself and by doing so improve my-own-self. But I feel a love and admiration for them knowing that they got through events like this and are still fighting the secret fight to become a real person.
  5. Cynthia
    *
  6.  Una (top photo, of course!)
  7. Josie Two Shoes (if you realized how often I’ve had to go between ‘text’ and ‘visual’ to keep the formatting from careening off the page like a car in an old time movie, you’d be saying, ‘Well, at the heart of this post is the person who puts in the time and effort to make it available for those with too many words in their head.’ Thanks J.)
  8. THIS SPACE AVAILABLE!  (If you’re out there and have not yet participated in the TToT but really want to, send a Grat Item***
  9. Sunday Supplement
  10. Secret Rule 1.3

 

* the rhetorical equivalent of a nice, over-sized quilt used for mid-winter afternoon naps… ‘tangle’ isn’t always a bad thing.

** so, I was, like five years old and there was an Easter Egg hunt in Oak Bluffs. There was a large, rectangular field and on the street end all the children were lined up with their parents and families behind them and the Starter stood on the forward left edge. The eggs were, of course, up in the field which actually was mostly grass. I’d spent most of a sleepless night planning and rehearsing in my head how I might do best. For some reason, a reason now lost in the litter of a lifetime of memories, I started running before the official start. I got a pretty good distance before I realized something was wrong. (lol… yeah) I finally stopped and turned around.    ….they waited for me to return to the starting line.4
*** Subject to the Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules), some restrictions may apply


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