The White Rabbit

Despite myself, this past weekend I rented two things from my local Hollywood Video, the Playstation game "Enter the Matrix" and the animated "Animatrix". Looking back, I can't say I planned to do this, only that the game looked interesting and I had heard good things about the video, and they were side by side in front of me. This was Saturday morning.

By Monday night, I had completed the game, having done little else all weekend but play through it. I was possessed. Although the game offered me special information as to the plots of all three Matrix movies, what sucked me in was the chance to be actively in the virtual world that I had seen on the screen - a world that was portrayed as a virtual world while in the real world people were "jacked in" to it. As a real world person now also "jacked in", I started to think in great detail about the films and what it was I was doing - how strangely addictive it was to play a game set in a virtual world that was the world I was living in.

This was only the beginning.

The Animatrix followed, feeding me with more special information and shifting further my perspective in regards to the trilogy. Following that was a rental of the original movie, which I watched on my laptop... on my chest... with headphones jacked in to the media. And this weekend, I'll see Reloaded on IMAX. My perspective continues to shift.

I began having the dreams. Each night when I went to bed, all of my dreams would begin with the same minor key notes that begin the movies and sometimes with the same scrolling green lines of characters, some frozen in place, some in motion. And I would flash and be in the dream, whatever that dream was. My dreams would play out and at some point, the phone would ring in my dream. I'd answer it and sit bolt upright in my bed, awake, with a great inhaling of air. I was dreaming the Matrix now. I was dreaming that I was in a virtual world, jacked in from this real world, and when I awoke, it was back here to this real world I went, the same virtual world that I had just been dreaming about. Each night, it was the same thing. And strangely, I was happier in those dreams and more at peace in them than I have been for years in dreams. What does that mean, I think, I thought... and I am thinking now.

I started to think about this world as the Matrix, more for fun at first, later very seriously. And then this really funny thing happened. I was at a local fast food joint ordering dinner and two frat boys walked in, the kind of frat boys that you know play baseball or softball. There isn't anything about them to suggest it, but somehow it's extremely obvious. They were both wearing grey shirts of the same brand. Each of them had on Ocean Pacific shorts, one of them in khaki and one in black. They had identical sandals on and identical watches. And each of them was wearing a grey-green baseball cap. I couldn't stop staring at them. I could tell that the caps had some sort of emblems on them, and I strained to see.

Suddenly, in unison, they stood upright and turned to look at me. And I saw the caps. One of them had A on it. The other had B.

A and B.

I almost laughed out loud. Two models of softball-playing frat boy to choose from, special ordered to your reality? Customizable? Please pick A or B, sir, and indicate how many you'd like...