Watch Your Head

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead

And the White Knight is talking backwards and the Red Queen’s off her head,

Remember what the Dormouse said:

Feed your head, feed your head.

--- Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit”

Feed your head, indeed. Or perhaps watch your head, the warning offered at the parking structure I use when visiting UC Irvine --- for meetings, readings, lectures, concerts, peaceful marches and protests --- which, along with “watch your back,” might be useful practical, physical, political and intellectual instruction. Watch your front, fact-check your zotALERTs, note the green-capped National Lawyers Guild legal observers, read the excellent reporting from the New University, find old friends and make new ones, attend a poetry reading until the helicopters and uniforms arrive and the campus is closed down.

This packed (sixteen features) and “action-packed” issue of Orange County’s unlikeliest online journal features two introductions---a form of public appreciation we admire here ---creative engagement and commentary about activism, a political cartoon, excerpts from a favorite radio show and podcast, cautionary oratory and fond remembrance, an original short (ghost) story, an amazing painter’s portfolio, another installment from an OC memoir by a legendary OC writer, and happy news on the artist who inspired this very journal. Finally, there’s an homage of sorts to the power of art, community and, yes, activism in the form of a reprint and---best of all---an update courtesy of a friend and mentor teacher who’s been there all along, doing the good work.

The features in this issue speak to the diversity, creativity and legacies of some of the most engaged folks of our community, a spectacle of abundance, memory and madness, too. Muchness, even. What did the Dormouse actually say? Well, he asked the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, “…did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?"  We offer one here.