If I told you I had an opinion on gun control. The hair on the back of your neck would shoot up and you’d dig in for a fight. Even if we’re friends. Even if I was the godfather of your child. Even if you needed my kidney to save the life of my new godchild (your new CHILD-child), you’d start the process of disowning me, before I even told you what my opinion is.

As my friend, you’d understand that if I opened a conversation with “I have an opinion on gun control…” you’d presume it was counter to your opinion on gun control, which I would also presumably know as we’re great friends.

If you’re against it, you already assume I’m against you. The masthead of this website is me, mustachio’d with a broadsword slung over my shoulder (refresh the page if another photo is displayed, it might take a couple tries). “Of course Nolan is the leftist of left-ites!” you tell yourself. You’re diggin’ in, you’re ready to fight.

If you’re for gun control, you’ll remember that I’m from Kansas. You’ll remember I never shut up about being from Kansas. You’ll see the beginnings of liberal treason. He is from the ruralest ruality (reality + rural, I’m pretty proud of it) in the reddest of red states. You’ll think it makes sense. You’ll believe you’ve been wrong about me this whole time.

You’re both assholes. Everyone who has an opinion here is an asshole. I basically just opened the conversation by telling you “I am an asshole,” and realizing that, I’m trying to pivot the pendulum back at you by proving you’re an asshole too.

Here’s my point. Your team is too clearly chosen. You knew what team you were gonna be on before the topic was even declared. There’s no use talking to either of you and it hurts. I love you both. You fucking idiot assholes.

When I was 18 I had to register for the draft. In the post office, I found out that was where you declare your political party for life. I checked the box marked Independent as fast as I could, walked out of the post office and flipped off the building with both hands as I walked away backwards in slow motion while the guitar solo from 1997′s “D’ya Know what I Mean?” played.

Fuck your teams, and fuck your presumption that you need one. I’m on your team. You presume I’m not. But I am. I always have been. It hurts me that you’re so scared of the other imagined team, that you’d label me as “them” just to have a place to put me. You don’t think this because you’re dumb. The other team says that about you. The truth is, you do it because you’re afraid. And you’re afraid because your team tells you you’re afraid. Guns are only useful to people who are afraid. People without guns are afraid of people with guns. People with guns are also scared of people with guns, but because they have guns, they’ve sublimated their fear into visions of shooting people who disagree with them about their right to have a gun, the right to process their fear…yadda yadda yadda, the snake eats it own tail, the frame becomes the painting, machines making machines making machines. Vampires pretending to be humans, pretending to be vampires, pretending to be humans.

I’m against gun control (although comprehensive background checks are a HUGE fucking “NO DUH,” Congress). I understand people who cling to their guns. They’re scared because there’s no money where they live. People with money want to take their guns. And guns are their base means of control over the threats in their paradigm, which have now become the rich people trying to take their guns. It’s a hard position to explain to someone who hasn’t lived on that side of the economic fence.

I’ve listened to people tell me, straight-faced, that they’re stockpiling guns to take their country back. In one second I ran down this branch of the dialogue tree in my head before I responded.

“Take the country back from who?”
“The government.”
“The government can shoot you dead where you stand, from space.”
“I’d like to see them try!”
“Well they’ve killed hundreds of Pakistani civilians this way, they’re not sweating one dude with 12 shotguns.”

The logic exposes a virulent wormhole after bringing up Pakistan. It forces the subject into a corner where their racism towards the president (which is used to baffling effectiveness by their team) and their racism towards Pakistanis are at odds with each other. A corner they have to punch their way out of, their escape route obstructed only by my face.

When you obsess about guns, you’re showing the world how powerless you feel. I only use the Pakistan drone strikes (probably a little too flippantly) as an example because it’s important to understand that if the things that you’re scared of happening do happen, the guns you own can’t help you. Maybe they make you feel safe, but they can easily be circumvented by your enemies. My contention is you have no enemies. Stop feeling afraid. Stop letting your team make you afraid.

I know I swung liberal there with the racism accusations. But, that was a real conversation with a real person who would stand tall and proud, look you in the eye and confirm his undying commitment to his racism. I dunno what to tell you, he’s your team. You’re the one who decided you needed a team.

Steve was my only regular when I opened on Sundays. The weekday regulars came in after their respective work days were done. Steve would come in around 3, only on Sundays, and drink top shelf vodka with olives.

A year later he sends me a text.

“In LA for the weekend, giving the keynote speech at conference at The Beverly Hilton.”

Forget, if you can, that my last post was also Beverly Hilton centered. You may already think I’m lying, I’m not. Let’s go back to the bar.

Steve could’ve been an average day-time regular except he had an open expression on his face. You could tell from looking at him he wanted to have a conversation, and we had many. As a prospect-less, midwestern, late-20′s bartender, most of my contribution to the conversation was how I had erroneously insisted on being an artist for so long that the opportunity to start a family had passed me by.

This is something the saddest bastard would confide in a bartender at the end of an epic drinking bing, but something about Steve pulls that information from the far side of the bar. I remember being a little offended at how dismissive he was towards the thorough portrait of my sad-little paradigm I had painstakingly painted for him.

He just calmly told me I was above all of the things I worried about. He listened intently when I described them, then cooly waved them off. “You’re too smart to not make it.”, he said. “I’ve been alive a long time and I’ve never seen times more difficult for young people to get started in. But you’ll be fine.” He commissioned me (out of the kindness of his heart) to do some drawings from old family photographs of his. Soon after that he gave me some symphony tickets.

One year later, on the far side of the country. I’m picking him up from The Beverly Hilton, taking him out to eat in Hollywood. Throughout, he acts like this is the most normal situation in the world. Finally I press him on that, “Is this not bizarre to you?!”

He just shrugged “I knew you’d make it.”

I am fully aware that this entry reads as complete, fraudulent, sentimental, bullshit. I’m consciously omitting a lot of details about the Nature of Steve’s work, I’m not sure he’d want it associated with this site. Or me for fucks sake.

If you ask someone where Biggie Smalls was killed, they’ll say “Wilshire and Fairfax” If you ask someone where the diner is that they went to at the end of American History X they’ll say “Wilshire and Fairfax” If you asked someone to average the addresses of Canter’s Deli and the La Brea Tarpits they’d say “Wilshire and Fairfax”. Actually they’d probably say The Grove.

The diner is there, it’s all lit up, it has Vegas style lights. Most of the outer wall real-estate of that building is covered in lightbulbs. Filament bulbs, the old warm ones. They’re still flashing in sequence, they’re overpowering, like Circus Circus. But the diner is closed. There’s nothing there. The lights are on every night, but there’s no boothes or tables in the building. It has to be some of the most valuble real-estate in the city and it just sits there empty.

Take Wilshire west for awhile (3 miles) and you’ll see the Beverly Hilton. It looks like it’s made of cinderblocks painted white by your highschool janitor. But they have the Golden Globes there. In the middle of the structure, at the top of it’s spinal column is a sign that says “The Beverly Hilton” in faceted, primary red letters on a white wall, made of vertical boards.

This is hard for me to explain. I wasn’t alive n the 70′s. When I was a kid my first knowledge that there was a 70′s was a distinct difference in cartoons. I was a child of the 80′s, I caught the tail end of Thundercats and Transformers. Still young enough to get on the Ninja Turtles boat. 70′s cartoons seemed to be 100% Hannah Barbera. Every character was only ever shown from one angle. Moving on a 2d plane. There was no depth, there was no world. These were newspaper comics that moved ever-so-slightly, and weren’t funny or pleasant.

Please believe me when I tell you this feeling of dread I first experienced as a child, blindly trying to nomenclate why these cartoons were bad, the ennui I felt while watching them, is the Beverly Hilton.

I’ve had a recurring dream, I haven’t had it in years, where me and my first boss, Danny Irby, are at my Grandmother’s sister’s house. Danny and I are in the yard, things feel bleak. I look to where the furniture store would be (they ran a small furniture store) and it’s the Beverly Hilton sign. It doesn’t say Beverly Hilton, it doesn’t say anything (in my dreams there are letters and words but they dont culminate in language, I also can’t hear sound, but never fail to discern what’s being spoken). But it’s those red faceted letters on a field of vertical white boards. Danny explains that everyone I’ve ever loved is inside and won’t be allowed out. It feels like the 70′s. All of it. Danny and I are forever outside of it to pick up garbage.

The most important thing, the thing I could never explain enough, is the 70′s dread. The logic of a society that would cover a marble floor in shag carpet. The logic of a society that mixed brown with every color, and then used THAT color for whatever their purpose may be, for a whole decade. The 80′s were a weird time to be a little kid but looking behind you at the 70′s, you just saw smoke. There were still houses done up in their 70′s interiors. They always smelled like death. There were plenty of sundries we dug out of the thrift store that made no functional sense, they smelled like the 70′s. And the 70′s smelled like death.

I felt all these feelings in an instant when I saw The Beverly Hilton.

I haven’t blogged in months and months because it’s hard to finish them. There’s no lessons learned, all of this is still reactive. That’s what this is, just a log of happenings. It seems significant to see something from your dreams in the waking world. That’s it.

Last night I was on the verge of sleep, my brain wasn’t thinking anything. I was fading into a walk-cycle in my mind. I was walking, through no setting whatsoever, thinking nothing whatsoever. Then one foot calmly stepped into a void and I began to free fall. This happens pretty often when I’m falling asleep.

I snap awake, as I always do, but this time was different. My leg kicked out, reaching for solid ground and it submerged in ice water. The cold made me dizzy as my brain had to simultaneously rotate my equilibrium 90 degrees. My eyes are closed, I see water. I open my eyes I see, what is that?

My mattress is a block of ice, my body heat can’t warm it beyond one inch from where it stops making contact. I’m looking at the open door to my room, something is distorting the view of the room beyond. It’s like heat lines coming off of a blacktop highway. There is no heat in my attic apartment, no climate control whatsoever. That’s why the mattress is freezing cold, that’s why I’m under two blankets.

The water was only dream logic, for the immediate and severe wave of cold, for the audacity of moving my leg two inches. I look again at the door, the waves are still there. I put on my glasses and stand up in the freezing apartment, walk to the door. The effect is gone.

I lay back down, cover myself back up in blankets, who in the last 20 seconds have forfeited all my accumulated body head, look back at the door. Wave city. Although the effect moves from bottom to top, I could swear the effect applied itself from left to right. Like a cloaked Elite (from Halo) stepped into my doorway and just stood there.