BEING FIRM ABOUT something is not really my forte. I am an Aries, and have an Aries temper, but deep down I want everyone to like me and so am always struggling to please.
I recently told someone that I could no longer work with them because they were preventing me from finishing a project.* I had been waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for a review process to take place that would allow me to move forward with my project. I began to feel like the project was no longer mine. I allowed them to gatekeep my project. I started to flesh out other ideas. I talked to many friends about these other ideas and they were all very encouraging (thank you Kristin, Brian, and my Thursday morning comic group soul siblings led by the brilliant Hyena Hell). I threw myself into research (R&D is my jam).
Then one comic soul sibling, artist and writer Suzan Colón, asked me what the hell I was doing. I admitted that I didn't know. She advised me to stick with my project. She reminded me that my project was mine. It was tough to hear, because I was so, so excited about this new project! And then I wouldn't have to worry anymore about this review process that was taking forever! But Suzan was right; I needed to hear that advice. And now I'm back at it, and feel the momentum kicking back in, and the feeling of persistence is a bit foreign (ahem, did I mention that I'm an Aries?) but also feels great.
Well, when I have time for it. I went back to school for my PEL, professional educator license, to be a high school English teacher, just like my mother and grandmother before me. Dear god wish me luck.
Today is the last day of August and to me that always feels like the end of Summer, even though technically yes, Fall doesn't officially start until the equinox on September 22nd. But school started for Michaela and me so I'm calling summer now. And it was a good summer, overall! Especially the last couple of weeks, when we actually got to go on a real, honest-to-goodness vacation and visited Bianca and her family in San Francisco and the Sierra Foothills, where we cooled off in the Yuba River, cried during Project Hail Mary (even better on a rewatch), laughed at Bianca voicing her cats' and dog's thoughts, and played a very silly and also very fun game called One Night Ultimate Werewolf.
I missed having dinner with Sheila due to a wildfire in a nearby town which, fortunately, was contained. It is weird how commonplace the fires are now and yet how everyone is also, rightfully, fully fucking freaked out by them. When I called the restaurant where we'd planned to meet to cancel our reservation, I told the person who answered the phone that we were canceling due to the fire, and their voice shifted to a serious register. They were very understanding and also expressed sympathy and well wishes, an appropriate response but one that made me feel a little guilty, as I was just passing through, a tourist who would in no way be impacted by whatever damage the fires might cause.
I felt a similar sense of guilt when, a week or so later, we drove through a totally blacked-out Gary, Indiana, on our way to Warren Dunes in Michigan, to play in the waves. I strained to see whether or not the lights were on, and they were not—every stoplight was out. I'm not loving the idea of summer travel that entails willfully ignoring the effects of climate change, but also I love to travel, and to see different places, and so it is something I need to learn to live with.
Three Things Keeping Me Going This Week
- Slash, the lead guitarist for Guns N' Roses, is a snake lover, and now he has a snake named after him.
- Little House on the Prairie. I never liked the TV series with Michael Landon (and I think in my head I conflated it with "Highway to Heaven," his other saccharine show, which I hated), but I loved the books. The reboot is far more faithful to the books, namely in using Laura as the main protagonist rather than Pa. It is also historically accurate in a way that Little House readers will appreciate, as well as people who are a little tired of the romanticization of westward settlers and are looking for a bit of vinegar mixed in with the honey.
- The 2026 water-lily weigh off ended last week. This wholesome, nature-loving, social-media capitalizing event was my kind of feel-good clickbait.
Mushroom News
I'm hardly alone in just now learning of the thousands of ways that Dolly Parton brought good into the world, but I was particularly surprised to learn that she has an Appalachian lichen named for her. The lichen was "found" on Hangover Mountain in western North Carolina—a place name that sounds like it might have been plucked from one of her songs. Researchers named the lichen after her as a way to honor her Appalachian roots and philanthropy in the region. For more on Dolly's conservation efforts, which were more numerous than one might think, see the latest issue of Patty Wetli's always-terrific Urban Nature newsletter which I highly encourage you to subscribe to, especially if you live in the Midwest. (Also, Wetli was the source for my two nature-related blurbs above.)
Bonus Mushroom News: Check out the amazing costumes at the Telluride Mushroom Festival, the oldest wild mushroom fest in the U.S. (H/t to photographer Vik Muniz's instagram feed.)
That's all for this week, dear Mushroom Heads. I'm working on another longer essay and hope to have that out to you next month. Thanks for hanging on as Mushroom Head oozes from a weekly-ish to a monthly schedule. I'm aiming for bimonthly but that might not happen for a while.
*I don't want to jeopardize this project so I can't say too much about it in this specific newsletter for fear that it could turn up on a google search, but longtime Mushroom Heads may remember that I have been working on a comic about a tutoring job I had a few years ago.
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