I am a lost soul in the surreal realm of East Philadelphia, guided by a resident and sarcastic tour-guide named John the Cat, who is a cat.
When I was on a dial-up BBS, I wrote many small free-form snippets of story about a version of myself who was lost and I discovered that there was no such place as "East Philadelphia" (neither officially nor by reputation), and decided that an urban Wonderland would be a nicely dangerous place to be lost.
John the Cat existed because I like cats, and I really wouldn't mind having a familiar. John is a black cat, of course. He's sarcastic, of course. But he also acted as the voice of harsh reality, the Cheshire Cat but a more constant companion. Of course if I tried to make this a story these days the idea of a "snarky animal companion" would be so tired that I'd be embarrassed, but it must speak to something because a snarky animal companion was my ideal before the word "web" was uttered outside of CERN.
Sometimes tropes are there for a reason.
I'm also amused when surreal things are juxtaposed with mundanity. I was the mundanity.
I never got past writing stories for myself, but I'm still drawn to things like this, not because Alice in Wonderland was formative to me but because the world is strange and complex and I appreciate writing that leans toward this.
I can, however, still recite The Jabberwocky from memory.