A Sinéad-shaped hole in the world

Warning: This post includes mentions of abuse, suicide and abortion.

I must have been 14 or 15 the first time I heard Sinéad O’Connor’s voice, howling and crooning “Mandinka” from our television in the hours after school let out for the day. Her debut album was brave, challenging, feral. I wasn’t sure what to make of her, this bald-headed siren on the screen. But I never forgot her. 

It was through interviews with O’Connor that I learned that abortion was illegal in the Republic of Ireland. Pregnant people who wanted not to be pregnant had to travel, and I knew, even then, that wasn’t possible for many people. When I heard the bare grief in “Three Babies,” in 1990, I assumed that’s what the song was about. (I didn’t learn until much later that it was about O’Connor’s miscarriages instead.)

Even so, that’s what went through my head when I watched her shred her mother’s photograph of Pope John Paul II that night on Saturday Night Live. In that moment, my chest filled with admiration — at her courage, at her willingness to put the Catholic Church in its place. And I was confused when she was crucified for it. 

Many of us didn’t know then that the Catholic Church was lousy with sexually abusive clergy, and many others knew but thought hiding and denying it would keep it from being true. That was the real force behind O’Connor’s gesture, and even after the truth came out decades later, the world failed to adequately apologize to her. 

O’Connor’s music came in and out of my life at key moments, including in 1997, when she released the “Gospel Oak” EP about a year and a half after my mom’s death. The whole album is a healing balm, in particular the opening song, “This Is To Mother You.” At the time, it felt like an umbilicus nourishing me from beyond the veil. Now, I suspect she wrote it in part for herself, to heal from the abuse she experienced at the hands of her mother when O’Connor was a child. 

That abuse launched O’Connor into her life’s trajectory in so many ways; she went to live with her father at 13, but soon fell into risky behavior, including shoplifting, which landed her in a Magdalene asylum (laundry). Run by Catholic nuns, these institutions claimed to be “reform schools” at best, but functioned as prisons and labor farms for girls and women. 

O’Connor was imprisoned in the An Grianán Training Centre, in northern Dublin, for 18 months. “We didn’t see our families, we were locked in, cut off from life, deprived of a normal childhood,” she told the Irish Times in 1993. “We were told we were there because we were bad people. … “We were girls in there, not women, just children really. And the girls in there cried every day.” 

That experience contributed to her SNL protest, she said. “It wasn’t the only reason, but it was one of them.” The last of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland didn’t close until 1996. 

I wasn’t raised Catholic, or even especially Christian. The Irish ancestors I know by name were Protestant, but I know I have others who were Catholic. They found great comfort in their faith, I can feel it in my bones. But they were also hurt by its restrictions, particularly for women and girls; I feel that, too. That’s part of why O’Connor’s protest ripped straight through me. It made me recognize a kindred spirit in her, even before I knew we both endured PTSD and mental illness, and would become mothers to suicidal children. That fury that rose up from her life and DNA? It was in mine, too. 

Sinéad O’Connor was so much more than her trauma and pain. She was a stunning singer, a gutsy and honest songwriter, a woman daring enough to go about the world without her mask. The news of her death tore right through me, and through so many of us, as though we were no more than paper. 

She said and did what so many others were afraid to. She was punished for it, and I can’t help but think she might have enjoyed a longer life if she hadn’t been. Today, the world is a little less brave, a little less honest, without her. 

What if the mushroom-infected people in “The Last of Us” are the good guys?

Hear me out. 

In the past several years, mushrooms’ mycelial networks have become demystified and celebrated, both as a key component of healthy forests and as an inspiration to human organizers and activists hoping to spark societal change. 

“Mycelium mushrooms have been one of my greatest teachers of trust,” says Nigerian healer Adaku Utah. “The mycelium organism is a dynamic root system of mushrooms that utilizes trust as a mechanism to build and sustain a vast, reciprocal, underground network that connects the roots of trees and plants and skillfully shares nutrients and resources to support the health of the entire ecosystem with which it moves. … The network process also fosters intergenerational relationships that welcome the myriad of ancient wisdom and connections that reside in older trees to benefit younger trees. These mushrooms affirm a commitment to building relationships of trust that encourage all life to bloom.”

[Warning: Spoilers for episodes one through four of “The Last of Us” beyond this point]

Right now, thanks to “The Last of Us,” the excellent video-game adaptation airing on HBO, many of us are feeling uneasy about mushrooms and their subterranean networks. The zombielike monsters in the show are infected by a strain of cordyceps mushroom that forms mycelial connections; brush up against one of these beings, and you alert dozens or hundreds nearby. And these suckers are fast. 

As I write this, I have not played the video game, and I don’t know how the story goes past episode four, “Please Hold My Hand.” But I have a theory: Although the infected humans are depicted as scary and ruthless (except, perhaps, for the one who tried to tenderly kiss Tess), I think the show is trying to tell us that these mycelial connections are superior to how many of the human characters are trying to operate.

In discussing the infected’s connections, podcaster Joanna Robinson points out, “There are no lies in something like that. You see something, I see it. You feel something, I feel it. There are no walls. That is a connected, thriving organism. By contrast, we get the hard shells that are around these various [human] characters because of their trauma.” 

Even before the cordyceps outbreak began in 2003, the United States government (along with those other parts of the world) was dipping its toes into fascism. After 9/11, the U.S. further militarized its police force and stepped up security measures, particularly in airports and government buildings. In the show, after the outbreak, many surviving humans are rounded up in military vehicles and taken to quarantine zones, where they can be punished with public hanging for trying to leave. Many others are exterminated. The QZs are policed by FEDRA guards with rifles. Newly infected people are euthanized and burned. 

In episode three, “Long, Long Time,” Frank accuses his partner, Bill, of mentally living “in a psycho bunker where 9/11 was an inside job and the government are all Nazis.” Bill correctly and hilariously shouts back, “THE GOVERNMENT ARE ALL NAZIS.”

He’s right, but his approach – for the first many years after the outbreak – is to hide out in a real bunker wallpapered with guns, in a neighborhood that he cordoned off with chain-link fences and barbed wire. It’s only when Frank falls into Bill’s trap that Bill realizes he needs connection and companionship more than he needs safety. Many years into their relationship, Bill says, “I was never afraid of anything until I met you,” but he says it with reverence. 

Some viewers felt that “Long, Long Time” was a distraction from the main story, but I think it was trying to tell us something about connection – the human connection that Frank and Bill found in unlikely times, and the connection Joel fights so hard to avoid, even with Tess, who was his romantic companion for many years. Even with Ellie who, he tells her, is no more than cargo.

“The Last of Us” offers glimpses of mycelia-like networks among humans, including the resistance group known as the Fireflies, and the Kansas City community introduced in episode four, but they are few and far between. And even these clusters are walled off, protecting their own against outsiders. The infected humans, by contrast, welcome all comers. Their network is much more democratic, much less hierarchical. 

Patrick Somerville, a writer for “Station Eleven,” another HBO adaptation that takes place in a post-outbreak future, commented on these human organisms on a recent podcast with Robinson and Mallory Rubin. “The people who survive in [‘The Last of Us’] are the people who do away with vertical power structures. And instead don’t have to be the alpha. They’re members of a community, together.”

He reflects this back to the community design in “Station Eleven,” which centers on a traveling theater troupe with a horizontal power structure. “No one has a trump card. You communicate. You humanize each other, remember how everyone’s feeling, and you solve the problem together. Group genius is bigger than individual genius.” 

What Somerville is describing is mycelial network. A true community of equals.

We humans, we’ve been taught that we are superior to animal and plant kingdoms, despite the brilliant ways in which hives of bees, colonies of ants or networks of fungi communicate and work together without conflict or friction. That’s part of where the fear comes in, watching a show like “The Last of Us.” We fear the infected, in part, because they would strip us away from what makes us individual, what makes us separate. 

But, to quote from “Station Eleven,” “To the monsters, we’re the monsters.”

I’m going to be watching “The Last of Us” with compassion and curiosity toward the infected. How about you?

Real-life plant medicine in a video game?!

Earlier this year, my partner started playing “The Long Dark,” a post-apocalyptic survival game set in the Canadian Arctic. I began watching him play, and was quickly drawn in by how beautiful and thoughtful the game is.

I’m easily frustrated and stressed out by video games; I don’t like it when there’s a short time limit or you’re constantly in danger.  “The Long Dark,” at least in “story” mode, mostly isn’t like that. You have all the time you need to find what you’re looking for or get where you’re doing, as long as you can stay warm and reasonably well-fed and hydrated. The snowy, mountainous landscapes are gorgeous, and even the most run-down shacks where you might spend the night feel cozy. (Okay, possibly not the ones that have frozen corpses in them.) There are occasional attacks by wolves, moose and other animals, but the story is the main thing. 

One aspect that drew me in was the use of real-world plant medicine. Oh, sure, the game warns you not to take anything in it as real survival advice, and some of the healing properties of the plants are beyond what their real-world counterparts can do. But with a little additional research, these plants can actually help us heal from common ailments and injuries.

Rose hips

Rose hips are a well-known and long-used plant medicine, both for their anti-inflammatory qualities as well as the fact that they’re rich in Vitamin C. The interior seeds are covered with irritating hairs, and should be scooped out before eating or cooking with rose hips. 

In “The Long Dark,” rose hips (like most of the other plants in this game) also have to be prepared before using, and can be made into a tea that helps with pain, burns or broken ribs. I’m not sure if real-life rose hips can do any of those, except perhaps pain relief, but they can keep you from getting scurvy from your mostly-meat diet.

Reishi mushrooms

Researchers are looking into a variety of mushrooms for their potential healing benefits, and reishi is no exception. Like many mushrooms, they can help boost our immune systems and help us fight off viruses, infections and possibly even cancer. In “The Long Dark,” they function more like antibiotics, helping you recover from food poisoning, infections, dysentery and intestinal parasites. Hmm. 

Birch bark

Birch and willow trees contain high levels of salicylates, which make up the principal anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving medicine in aspirin. (Willow’s latin name is salix.) Before medicinal companies began synthesizing aspirin, people the world over used birch and willow for pain relief. In “The Long Dark,” birch bark is pretty rare, and its main benefit is helping to “restore condition” by 5 percent, a perplexing and vague outcome. 

Old man’s beard

Old man’s beard is a kind of long, stringy lichen in the usnea family, often found dangling from trees (Spanish moss is in the same family). All lichens have antibiotic and antimicrobial properties and have been used for millennia to treat wounds and infections. In “The Long Dark,” the function of this plant matches closely with real-world uses; your character turns it into bandages that reduce the risk of wounds becoming infected. 

(If you’d like to see me preparing some usnea oil and other herbal items, check out my latest video on YouTube.) 

Cattails

If you’ve read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s popular book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” you may recall her reverence for the cattail plant. On Facebook, she writes of its many, many uses: “Food from the roots, vegetable from the stalk, pollen for flour, edible flower stalks, seeds for tinder or diapers, leaves for cordage and mats and baskets, torches from seed heads, aloe-like medicine from the goo which looks slimy but feels great on bug bites … and more.” For this reason, I was especially excited to see cattails in “The Long Dark,” even if their usefulness is diminished. You can eat the stalks for a small amount of nourishment, and use the heads for tinder. 

Unfortunately, the final chapter of “The Long Dark” isn’t out yet, so we won’t know how it ends until late 2023, and that’s if the ending comes out on schedule. Have you played it? What did you think?

We should have trusted our Eddie Munsons all along

Content warning: brief discussion of suicide and child murder, spoilers for “Stranger Things” season 4. 

Let’s get this out of the way: I love Eddie Munson, the charming metalhead teen introduced in the new season of “Stranger Things.” I was a teenager in the 1980s, too, and he reminds me of dear friends I had at that age. In some ways, I wanted to BE him, but I was too much of a “good girl” to try. 

More than that, I love the story that stirs up around him, and how it turns the 1980s moral panics over Satanism, role-playing games and heavy metal upside down. I wrote about these panics in “The Columbine Effect,” in an effort to show that scapegoated teen pastimes are sources of community, creativity and solace. So it made me incredibly happy to see “Stranger Things” stump for them, too, particularly through Eddie. 

On paper, it doesn’t seem like Eddie Munson should work as a character. His name alone is a collage of too-obvious cultural references: Eddie Van Halen, Eddie Munster, Charles Manson, and Eddie the mascot for Iron Maiden, whose music Eddie defends in the opening of season 4, episode 8. The Duffer brothers based him, in part, on Damien Echols, one of three teens sentenced to prison in 1993 after being wrongly convicted of murdering three young boys. Although prosecutors didn’t have any solid evidence against Echols and his friends, the fact that he studied witchcraft and liked Metallica in the midst of the Satanic Panic put a target on his back. 

In “Stranger Things,” Eddie is a classic metalhead, adored by people who know him but misunderstood by everyone else. He wears his curly hair long, and his daily uniform includes a denim vest plastered with metal-band patches and a t-shirt advertising his Dungeons & Dragons group, The Hellfire Club. So when Chrissy Cunningham dies in his trailer – a victim of a demon attack – Eddie and his D&D- and metal-loving ways are immediately blamed.  

But there’s a twist: we, the audience, know Eddie didn’t do anything wrong. We see the community whipping up frenzy around him – because they don’t know about the Upside Down, about its demon creatures, the Mind Flayer, or Vecna (himself originally a D&D character!), who are the real problems here. 

To understand how people in the 1980s became so terrified of role-playing games, it helps to look at the history. 

In 1979, James Dallas Egbert III, a student at Michigan State University, ran away from school with the intention of ending his life. He left behind a note mentioning the steam tunnels beneath the school, as well as Dungeons & Dragons. Local reporters claimed the game inspired him to run away. He returned, but the 16-year-old college prodigy faced unbearable stress and was allegedly battling a drug addiction. He succeeded in ending his life a year later. Many believed D&D was at least partly responsible.

Then, one June afternoon in 1982, Irving “Bink” Pulling, a 16- year-old resident of Montpelier, Virginia, took his family's loaded handgun and shot himself in the chest. His mother, Patricia Pulling, found him dead in the front yard. While going through her son's belongings, Pulling found a handful of Dungeons & Dragons books and asked around to find out what they were. At a local shop that sold role-playing supplies, she asked a clerk how she could learn more about the game. Eventually, she wound up connecting with a handful of gamers at a local college. They played D&D with her for more than a month, according to her book, “The Devil's Web.”

Bink's friends and teachers said he was suffering from depression, isolation, and instability. Despite this, Pulling became convinced that Dungeons & Dragons had made her son want to kill himself. In 1984 she founded Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, or B.A.D.D., an organization she hoped would raise awareness about the supposed evils of role-playing games. 

Egbert's story inspired a 1981 novel by Rona Jaffe, “Mazes and Monsters,” as well as a December, 1982, film starring Tom Hanks. In the movie, Hanks plays Robbie, a college student who joins his peers in a game of the fictional Mazes and Monsters RPG. He suffers a psychotic break while playing a live-action version in the caverns near their university. Robbie begins behaving like his M&M character in real life, and will only respond to the character's name. Disoriented, he treks to New York City in search of his estranged brother, and nearly dies by suicide. The movie added fuel to the idea that D&D puts its players in danger. 

And in 1985, Newsweek ran a cover story on role-playing games, called “Kids: The Deadliest Game?” In “Stranger Things,” Eddie reads aloud from a similar Newsweek article and mocks it. 

“If kids can believe in a god they can’t see,” Pulling told Newsweek, “then it’s very easy for them to believe in occult deities they can’t see.” In “Stranger Things,” there is a demon that many of the kids can see but the adults, for the most part, haven’t. After Vecna kills Chrissie and two other local kids, Eddie winds up on the receiving end of a massive manhunt, complete with locals stocking their arsenals at the local gun store and a catchy title for the crime spree: “The Munson Murders.” 

But again, we see Eddie as nothing but kind, loyal and brave, fighting to protect the very same community that demonized him. His D&D crew becomes his real-life fighting party, and his love of heavy metal – displayed most vividly in a blistering performance of Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” while surrounded by a tornado of demobats – ultimately makes him a hero. Epic times call for epic music, and Eddie, like most metalheads, understands this implicitly even when society hates him for it. 

In getting to know Eddie, a good-hearted character who’s devoted to D&D and metal, audiences can see how wrong we were in the ‘80s by sidelining guys like him, or worse – sending them to prison for two decades. Maybe, in the future, we can do better.