Hello! If you're new here, welcome. Mushroom Head is a comic diary about me, Claire, a middle-aged lady who lives in Oak Park. Previous installments recorded the time I thought I'd ODed on THC and my experience parenting a person with ADHD as a person who has ADHD. There are also occasional forays into the surreal. If you'd like to get in touch with me, please feel free to respond directly to this email. (Also, you might want to put the Mushroom Head email address into your contacts to avoid having it go to your junk folder.) I'm always happy to hear from you!

WE'VE HAD CLEAR skies and seventy-degree weather the past few days. My niece was hospitalized for an extremely nasty eye infection. (Thankfully, she has recovered.) Michaela came home with a math test and neither of us were thrilled with her grade. We're driving to Montreal next week. The pool opened last weekend. Due to drug shortages I haven't been able to get my ADHD meds. My concentration is completely shot. Summer couldn't have come at a better time.

I've been diving back into Study Hall and over the next few months I will probably use this newsletter to posts updates about this. I'm also going to start sending out Mushroom Head on a less frequent basis—whether that means twice a month or three times a month, I'm not entirely sure yet.

Are you feeling ready for summer? What are your plans? Are you traveling or staying put? Any tips for road trips/traveling with kids? Let me know!

"Study Hall" is a longer comic which grew out of the comic diaries I kept throughout 2022-23, the year I tutored at MCI-Concord, a medium-security prison just outside Boston. What follows are preliminary drawings and texts for the comic.

At the beginning of this year, Massachusetts officials announced that they were closing MCI Concord this summer. Megan Marshall kindly sent me various articles about the closure (thank you, Megan!). According to the Boston Globe, Massachusetts has nearly halved its incarceration rate over the past decade. Closing the facility should save the state $15 million, which hopefully will be funneled into reentry services for recently decarcerated people.

Concord is generally known as the location of Walden Pond, which Henry David Thoreau made famous when he opted out of the demands of a capitalist society and went to live in a small cabin on the banks of the pond, where he wrote Walden.

I don't think we have as many options for living now as we did in 1845, when Thoreau walked away from a consumer-driven lifestyle and took up a quiet life in the woods.

Thoreau was not the only philosophizing radical, or radical philosopher, to spend time in Concord. Between 1961 and 1963, a team of Harvard researchers led by Timothy Leary administered doses of psilocybin to incarcerated volunteers at MCI Concord. Leary's takeaway from the Concord Prison experiment had less to do with fantastic visions of transcendence than with the grim reality of social inequities in the United States. Reflecting on the experiment in 1969, he saw that the greater need for decarcerated people was post-release treatment and care.

Among the many visitors who came to MCI Concord was Mother Teresa, who visited in 1988. She blessed 500 rosaries during her visit.

I'm still sorting through material about MCI Concord and trying to figure out how to tell this story; apologies if this seems a little scattershot. It's all part of the process. Let me know what you think.

Meanwhile...

Three Things That Kept Me Going This Week

This article in New York magazine about Cop City in Atlanta may not have inspired a whole lotta hope for the future of our justice system, but I appreciated the journalist's clear foreshadowing of potential totalitarianism.

Sumptuous black-and-white cinematography, a great cast, and some cool Caravaggio references made Ripley impossible not to watch. (And I nearly did not watch; it took me two episodes to really get hooked.)
Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, etc.

Thank you as always for reading! Mushroom Head is off next week. I'll be back June 14.

Claire