Prologue

Jonathon Niedermeyer was exactly who you’d think he was—given his name of course.  And the fact that with a name like that he was pretty obviously human.  

Actually not so obviously in Los Angeles, where people name their dogs Richard Nixon and their cats Mr.Pritchard  and their cockatoos Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, and sometimes even their  body parts after philosophers, scientists, famous Disney characters,  chewed-up child stars or even sober and perfectly constructed media intellectuals from one of the three cable news channels or their local affiliates.   Because living in Los Angeles is too much like living on the surface of a ball bearing, where you only stick if you compress your whole prone body around its smooth, hard circumference, and hold on for dear life, and then distract yourself from the existential terror of falling off by being ueber-not concerned.  

Ueber Not- concerned enough to pretend like naming your animals or your body parts or even your scat after famous people, or listening to the nothing-scatter of half-inch deep techno-punk-god-forbid-it-pretends-to-mean-anything music where disingenuously “loose” women with open cleavages and closed empathies construct a money gobbling machine of fame and name-recognition that is exactly shallow enough to make your ball-bearing clinging surface in Los Angeles seem as deep as it ever gets—ueber not concerned enough for pretending that.  

So you cling white-knuckled to the ball-bearing and pretend not to be scared by effulging your West coast Ueber-not concernedness that repels and repulses any god-forbid empathy real people might feel for you.  Because that would mean you are living an empty existence.  And that would mean it indeed all means nothing and Nietsche is dead and God didn’t have the last laugh because oh by the way.  Pause.  God IS dead.  

And you suspect it deep in your plastic cartoon-Christian hearts.  

Which makes every tablespoon of air you vacuum into the back of your throat a brutal act of terrorism because it keeps you and your existential nothingness alive just long enough to continually re-not-feel your existential nothingness.  Water-boarding in reverse.  But worse.  Life-boarding.

Only real option for human beings in the gulag of daily terrorism that is the West in the 21^st recorded century :  Ueber-not-concernedness.  

   

But Jonathon happened to have been born with a particular and elemental deficit in the spiraling loops of his 32^nd chromosome pair that left him with a curious and highly rare neurotype. 

The genetic defect had led during his embryogenesis to a iterative cascade of chemical interactions that ultimately resulted in an under-provisioning of his left sub-parietal-cortex with sufficient myelination and neurogenesis.  This weakened his propensity for self-absorption and denial, and simultaneously his ability to encode and solidify the relentless media-cavitated neuroprogramming of a 21^st century human upbringing.  In short, unlike others, he could not bludgeon back his empathy instinct.

This in turn made him feel the wanton brutality of the gleaming antisepsis of life in Los Angeles moment by moment and thought by thought.  It made him remain empathic even against the incessant alienating and desensitizing instructions of the tyrant of his culture.  In other words, it made him a singular example of archetypal  human genuineness in the fractured and atomized center of an Ayn-odized American fiduciary and financialized world. 

     

It turns out that Jon Niedermayer was destined from birth to become and remain a grotesque pariah in the world.