Repetitive Motion Disorder and You

	The calluses bleed every night. He had picked at dry hardened skin right where the fingers on his left hand meet the palm until eventually, the self-inflicted wounds became infected. He let the infection fester for months. Day after day, Billy Iskra would wake up with blood on the sheets, then, on his way to work, he would get a foul smelling mixture of pus and blood on the doorknob, then on his car keys, then on the steering wheel. He was leaving a disgusting trail wherever he went; he was resigned to just wiping it off. He didn't buy bandaids, or gauze, or make any effort to get antibiotics. Not that he couldn't afford it- he had enough money, just enough, if he picked up an extra shift or two some month, he could get by and see the company doctor. He made decent enough money at the slaughterhouse.
	He was indeed lucky to have a steady paying job. Meatpacking, unlike so much so-called steady employment, had stubbornly resisted automation. Something about disassembling carcasses just suits the human hand. Assessing the contours of the body by touch alone, finding where flesh meets bone, and striking at the right angle persistently eludes artificial intelligences.
	Billy dons his armor, chainmail (protection from errant knives or cleavers from his impossibly close coworkers), laid over an off-white lab coat, then swings a knife over and over for a 12 hour shift, making subtle adjustments each time for the particular geography and topology of each carcass. The latex gloves and knife handle combine to create an awful friction, yielding the aforementioned calluses and blisters on his fingers, but the repetitive motion also makes his shoulder ache. There's a company physical trainer, but during stretch breaks, Billy keeps working, unwilling to show weakness to the bosses or, more importantly, the cows, who surely would rather be tended to by a man with dedication, some nobility, than some prick self-righteous enough to take yoga breaks during a mutilation.
	Standing all day with a forward lean hurt his left hip. When he tried to rotate the joint in a natural walking motion he would feel a slight but unsettling click, so he compensated by walking through the maze of slides, belts, and hooks with an unsightly hunch and a slight but noticeable wobble. His coworkers would ask if he was limping, if he was alright, if he was injured, and he usually couldn't hear them between the noise and the face shields. Otherwise, he would respond, "no I'm fine." They took the wobble to be his natural gait.
	If Billy took the initiative, the company had microeconomists on retainer who could've easily diagnosed him with depression and prescribed the appropriate medication. So easily in fact, it could've been used as a teaching moment, a chance to show students what the textbook descriptions look like in real life.
	Billy had a quantifiable distortion in his behavior. He was choosing not to pursue medical care for his many ailments, despite his ability to purchase that care- almost as if he were entirely indifferent to himself. Funny, since this was a deviation in the portion of his economic behavior represented by what's called the Indifference Curve. An indifference curve is a plot where the x and y axes represent quantities of different goods available for purchase, and a concave curve maps pairs of quantities of the two goods (each point/pair being called a 'bundle') between which, the consumer would be indifferent [or, be just as fulfilled by (or, gain just as much utility from)]. For example, one could easily plot a curve of say, Sally, who is indifferent between the bundles of 4 apples and no oranges (4,0), 2 apples and 1 orange (2,1), or no apples and 4 oranges (0,4). 
	For an ordinary economic agent, an indifference curve wouldn't pass through the origin. One can be diagnosed with depression and become eligible for care when their behavior exhibits an indifference between the origin (aka zero comma zero, aka nothing) and bundles of goods with tangible positive content. Billy acted as though his own health or sickness, his own flourishing or failure, his own life or death were no different. Given this flaw, without rational consumption patterns, his personality withered away, disentangling itself from the world until "he" was nothing but a geometric/metaphysical point in space.
	We call metaphysical points like these: monads. They are the building blocks of reality, but not like the physical elementary particles. Instead, monads compose the world’s spiritual structure. They are not touchable nor sensible. But they are indivisible, everywhere, the soul of the world. Billy Iskra is one.
	Each monad flounders towards the absolute, but only from its own point of view. Embodying the ancient principle of the mutual inclusivity of all phenomena and every instant, they hear every sound and feel every motion, if only a portion of an echo of a vibration be it too far, or an overwhelming sublimity be it too close. The whole world, and everything that has or will ever happen, is to some extent reflected in each monad. Therefore, the monad is the soul's atom, a windowless particle, a closed system, nothing goes in or out. What could a monad lack?
	They can’t be foreign to themselves, for there is nothing outside. Each contains the universe and all its mysteries, yet can only clearly make out a spoonful. Sounds like you, right? After all, aren't you a monad, just like Billy? Well, let's see:
    
don't you hear everything? like the underlying hatred in a cheerful voicemail from a dear friend? she wants to catch up. your heart rate spikes. can't you taste a bit of everything? the fetid garbage in a decent meal from a reliable chain restaurant? stomach acid bubbles up into your throat. you want to go home. what about the million pinpricks in a loving embrace? you recoil from the touch, right? you find the warmth in frostbite, the sweat in a dry sunny sky, the muddled fog hanging over a focused workday, the million deaths in every living moment? the whole world's tattooed onto you. you wear so-called enemies’ brands on your skin. you find a glimmer of yourself in everything else. you're alone. you're a monad too, I'm certain.


***


	Wait- too late, you woke up with a failing brain. You can already tell. You could stay at home, but you're not unreliable. You're not going to resist the inertia that animates you every day, and you're no coward. You keep going to work. 
	Then at the plant everything is compressed. Too much is happening too fast. You bump your coworkers, and lose your balance only to be propped up by the surrounding bodies. A couple times a week you fall over on the line, your coordination giving out on you in periodic intervals. It seems random.
	You hit the tender puller in the chest with an errant swing of your knife. It harmlessly hits chainmail, but sparks a confrontation. What the fuck is wrong with you. You stand there slack-jawed confused at what’s happened struggling to respond looking around frantically. Wait- the tender puller is restrained by the tail ripper before he can land a punch on you.
	Your twitches got worse. What used to be a minor tic of the left eye is now involuntary complex movements of whole limbs. Sometimes you grimace, wince, sometimes slap yourself in the face, sometimes punch the table, flex your entire leg and stomp on the floor. Every time you quickly pretend to have been stretching or scratching an itch or whatever, but you weren't. Your coworkers already considered you weird enough that the obviously spasmic movements are easily incorporated into their understanding of you.
	Somehow, you made it through a day. On the way home from the plant you suddenly forget where you're going. Or maybe you've always been a car speeding along a dark road. What more could you be? Apply occam's razor and conclude: you've always been the highway hurdling by, seen only through a windshield, lit only by headlights. A reflexive grimace and some punches of the steering wheel briefly intrude. You don't make it home, but you remember to make it back for work. There's a specialist in town that you need to see, but every spin on the indifference curve keeps coming up empty.
	Billy Iskra handled hundreds of cow carcasses an hour. This had jacked the odds in the disease transmission lottery inordinately in Disease's favor, and ultimately Billy lost. One cow ate grass growing from some unlucky soil, where some proteins were folded the wrong way, and now Billy's brain doesn't work like it used to. That’s right: prions, of mad-cow fame. Prions confer their misfolded shape onto surrounding proteins, so when one gets into you, it starts a chain reaction of mirrored misfolded proteins. Like hands or shoes, the proteins are chiral objects, which are incompatible with their mirrored counterparts, so the diseased prions cause dysfunction as they spread. And once it starts, it’s only a matter of time before they flip you into a chiral object of yourself. The brain fails, the body fails, and you die. 
	This disease started with Billy, but it quickly spread. The molecule mirroring accelerated in a positive feedback loop: as more proteins encountered their chiral counterparts, more flipped. It went exponential. It was hungry. Not satiated by proteins, this insurrection of mirror-images mutated, so as to move to other material. All material: every molecule, atom, positron, and quark remade a failed copy. It grows. Lakes, skyscrapers, hometowns, all reversed, all wrong. Then the fun part of exponential growth. Planets flip. Galaxies. 10^1000. Then 10^100000. Then the numbers they don't tell you about. It moved faster than information, faster than you could read this, faster than the light reached your eye. In fact, the cascade of broken brains already hit you. Yep, it moved so fast you might not have noticed at the time. It happened while you blinked, but in retrospect, you probably remember the day the universe became an image. The world grew flat, your inner life lost depth, you were made complicit. Call it your birth as a monad.


so here we are
welcome to the worst of all possible worlds.
you’re a monad, so get used to it.
some tips:
to live like a monad is to asymptotically approach the present
                        to always be everywhere else
to work like a monad is to bear the entire reproduction of society in one dismembered carcass
                        to be made an abstract instrument of alien logistics
to see like a monad is to see the vibrant light of a distant star refracted through a prism of cow viscera
to breathe like a monad is to inhale toxic fumes in an empty field
to listen like a monad is to hear the word of God in an overenthusiastic supervisor with a megaphone
                                                  in the timbre of HR's hold music
to move like a monad is to teleport
                        to slide down a frictionless sphere
to remember like a monad is to recall long-forgotten epochs in their echoes off the warehouse walls
                            to always bear in mind the bad side of the good times
youre a mirror held up to the universe and dropped in shock
a corrupted model of the world made molecule by molecule
a faint reflection of infinity
this is all that's left but
it's only lonely till it’s over since
when a monad dies
its whole world dies too