When Jessica Vaugn realized her new song The End had been featured in a pivotal scene in Netflix’s Bridgerton, she was thrilled. Ironically, although it is featured in a sweeping romance, it’s not a love song. Recorded under her alias JPOLND, the song is actually about a toxic relationship. According to Vaugh, “The ideal is that if I’m going down, so are you… There is something intoxicating about love and lust being doomed.”
Nevada Screaming Raven — The Gravel Ghost
At this point in the year, almost all of the white flowers that have been flourishing here in North Carolina during the spring have withered and fallen to the ground. But it you look closely, there is still some luminosity to be found among all the green foliage.
While scrolling through Instagram recently, I spotted a post by an old coworker. She had recently gotten a new tattoo, covering her inner forearm. Looking closer, I realized it was a full size Dark Mark. The tattoo and cheerfully glib caption left me feeling conflicted. If your not familiar with the symbol, it’s a huge part of the Harry Potter series. Essentially, it appears in the sky when the followers of Voldemort (the villian) kill. Voldemort’s followers are called Death Eaters, and the Dark Mark is also burned into their arms when they join him. Voldemort’s quest is to “purify” the wizarding world by purging it of any wizards born to non-magical parents, who are referred to as “mudbloods.” This fixation on blood purity makes the Death Eaters comparable to Nazi’s and White Supremacists, and to me, makes the Dark Mark comparable to a swastika. When I read the books, I thought the allegory for white supremacy was pretty explicit. So why is my former coworker proudly showing off the tattoo of a fictional hate …
Found this birds nest in my front yard, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one with a covering of lichen before.
