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

the point where you don’t merely tolerate them but rather appreciate
them – their unique texture, their diaristic qualities,
their trusting?
Can you even smell that?
(*SMACK!*)
How about now?
The index of decay is worse than the thing in itself, don’t you
think? I mean, like a bloodstain. I mean, getting shit on your
finger – your shit, mind – condemns that finger for a long time,
doesn’t it? The bedclothes of the terminally ill seem like incredibly
classified documents. Again, a diary, but written with the
left hand and automatically. In that circumstance, how to avoid
descending into desperate scribbling? Your body – incapable
of holding anything, let alone a pencil or pen – prone-ish in
the hospital bed (propped up indelicately, brusquely by some
idiot fucking orderly completely unheeding of your wretched
pleas) – nevertheless does a lot of writing. The surge of need for
a piss, the desperate attempt to position the cardboard receptacle
around your genitals (completely, to make sure) – perhaps
the lack of shame attached to any of this (this being your umpteenth
distress in a litany of distresses far worse than pissing)...
and after all that effort, you can only muster a dribble; a retarded
Crayola scrawl in the tilted corner of that fucking receptacle.
[...] There are so many incongruities here, so many betrayals
to account for, that outrage and protestations are absolutely
useless. In any case, your body is deaf, mute, dumb and, more
importantly, dangerous. No use talking to it is there. Anyway,
it’s busy indenting the mattress, excreting sweat, shit, tears, piss
and, in a case all too familiar to me – SOMETHING ELSE.
Something grey, produced wrongly, through all the wrong