Through the Looking Glass Ceiling

Dispatches from Wonderland in a Time of Fascism.

So — I’m in my own little world tonight.
(Well, not little, really — it’s quite sprawling when you zoom out —
but “my own” nonetheless.)

And I just had one of those oooh ah-ha moments — the kind that feels cosmic
and completely useless at the same time.
You know — the kind where your brain just starts dumping symbolic files
into your lap like, “Here, deal with this.”

Anyway, the two things that showed up —
because my cognition loves a weird mashup —
were fascism and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
(Yes, I know. My brain is basically a graduate seminar taught by a raccoon.)

So, right —
Alice goes into Wonderland,
and I keep thinking: we’re there, collectively.
We’ve fallen through the looking glass and landed
somewhere between a BuzzFeed headline and a fever dream.

Look around:
Talking frogs in Portland,
algorithmic queens yelling Off with her head! on social media,
bureaucratic guards enforcing nonsense rules written in invisible ink.

It’s absurd — and yet entirely predictable.
A fractal pattern.
A re…