The Present Tense
Parker Thornton
Halfway into quarantine I tried to exorcise my deepening depression by googling “best movies to make you cry”. This inquiry led me to watch PT Anderson’s three hour melodrama Magnolia on my laptop while taking a hot bath and drinking a White Russian. I didn’t cry. I didn’t even come close. In looking for catharsis I only settled further into malaise.
In the past, when depression was much louder in my life, it coupled with my youth to produce marvelously impulsive feats of self-determination and/or self-destruction. It was explosive. The choices I made were so bad they sometimes looped back around to being good.
Now I know enough to know better, but I don’t know enough to know what to do. I’m grasping for ways to make my time feel less impotent. To make me feel less impotent. I downloaded Duolingo to brush up on my high school French. I clean and clean and clean and clean the house. I apply for grants. I look for jobs. Job hunting is the only endeavor that induces the fits of crying I had hoped for from watching Magnolia. It’s become an incredibly masochistic exercise, because the longer self-isolation endures the fewer jobs there are and the more desperate I am to get one.
Appeasing my depression with sad movies and a sudden interest in Aimee Man’s music didn’t pay off, so I veered the other direction. I began rewatching favorite sitcoms and religiously practicing Yoga with Adriene on YouTube. I planted seeds for a small victory garden. My girlfriend and I decided to spend a beautiful spring weekend in the North Georgia mountains.
We picked up some mushrooms from a friend before going. “They’re kind of old,” she warned us. “Here, just take a lot.” She handed me a small jar stuffed full. Once we got to our cabin, I placed a couple of stems inside a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Thirty minutes passed, then an hour, and we felt nothing. I shoved three times as many stems into plain bread. Nothing. We poured the remainder of the mushrooms out of the jar and chewed them, pouring potato chips into our mouths to chase away the bitter taste. Nothing, nothing ever happened.
There is a strange curse on me: I graduated high school into the great recession, college into a revelation about a loved one’s heroin addiction, and graduate school into a global pandemic. I feel I keep failing to solve a riddle. This being my third attempt, by fairy tale logic it must be time for divine intervention from a magical helper.
In my freezer there are five dead birds. Four are babies that died shortly after hatching a few weeks ago, in a nest a House Finch made in our guest bedroom window. One is a beautiful red Cardinal that it seems a cat attacked. I found its body in our backyard. I thought, maybe if I can make art out of these, it won’t seem as much like an omen of the apocalypse.
Last week I went by the creek behind my house to photograph a new piece I made, a latex impression of tree bark on silk. The woods quickly become thick with kudzu and pines back there; it felt I was a world away from Atlanta. I became nostalgic for my childhood home, with acres of land and a creek and stretches of time more vast than I’m experiencing now in self-isolation. I filled much of that time fantasizing of a busy life full of devastatingly interesting friends, culture, adventures, romance, and drama. Standing on the banks of South Fork Peachtree Creek, two months into quarantine with god-knows-how-many to go, I could hardly distinguish these memories of childhood desire from the pining I now felt to return to my friends, engage with culture, and get swept up in the trivial dramas of daily life amongst people.
Silk Skin I (Clyde Shepard Nature Preserve). Latex, silk, moss, bark. 70” x 22”. 2020.
Detail of Silk Skin I (Clyde Shepard Nature Preserve). Latex, silk, moss, bark. 70” x 22”. 2020.
