For the happy man! - Collected writings DEPRESSION: Ed Atkins

say – but it’s worth it, eh?, an open hand on your shoulder.
You’re bent double before me, one hand to your chest,
tears on a face I find hard to recognise, let alone console.
It’s exhausting, you say, later, so we go for a nap.
(You nod off to a confrontation with the tumour, demanding
the cessation of its aggression. The tumour answers in rubbery
squeaks, renting sounds, gargling. This is the only way
you can apprehend the thing: in dreams. Sprinting through
the long wet grass, away from the terrible oasis of security
lights and the tumourous folly – and its familiar occupant –
heading for a shadow on the horizon you take to be a line of
trees. The sound of your heavy breathing alongside the swishing,
quiet thwap of the
grass. Somewhere behind
you – you don’t turn
to look – comes your
own SCREAM,
filtered through
everything (Auto
Filter, Auto Pan,
Beat Repeat, Cho-
rus, Compressor,
Corpus, Dynamic
Tube, EQ Eight,
EQ Three, Ero-
sion, Filter Delay,
Flanger, Frequen-
cy Shifter, Gate,
Grain Delay, Limiter,
Looper, Multiband
Dynamics, Overdrive,
Phaser, Ping Pong Delay,
Redux, Resonators, Reverb, Saturator, Simple Delay, Spectrum
Utility, Vinyl Distortion, Vocoder, Arpeggiator, Chord
Note Length, Pitch, Random Scale, Velocity; AKA: Altretamine,
Hexalen, Asparaginase, Elspar, Bleomycin, Blenoxane,
Capecitabine, Xeloda, Carboplatin, Paraplatin, Carmustine,
BCNU, BiCNU, Cladribine, Leustatin, Cisplatin, Platinol,
Cyclophosphamide, Cytoxan, Neosar, Cytarabine, Cytosar-U,
Dacarbazine, DTIC-Dome, Dactinomycin, actinomycin D,
Cosmegen, Docetaxel, Taxotere, Doxorubicin, Adriamycin,
Rubex, Imatinib, Gleevec, Doxorubicin, Liposomal,
Doxil, Etoposide, VP-16, VePesid, Fludarabine, Fludara,
Fluorouracil, 5-FU, Adrucil, Gemcitabine, Gemzar, Hy-