Enter the Matrix

My introduction to The Matrix was not by way of the film itself, but rather the film's soundtrack.

The summer of 1999 was winding to an end, and I was nearing my 8th birthday. Anticipation whetted my nerves, I could almost taste the number itself, encroaching on me at an excruciatingly slow pace. I wanted what every seven year old boy wanted: to turn a year older.

The other thing I remember wanting the most, nearly as badly, and all the more urgently, was to see The Matrix. As I ran and swung and jumped and played outside, enjoying the cooling weather and long nights, I can remember hearing music playing from one of the second story windows on the back of my parent's house. My older sister, then freshly turned sixteen, had purchased the soundtrack to The Matrix and frequently played it on her stereo with the window open, and the sounds drifted down toward me in my youthful exercise. Sounds of Rob Zombie, Deftones, Prodigy, Marilyn Manson and Rammstein filled my ears, foreign invaders that I did not yet recognize or know well enough (let alone foresee that they would later be artists I listened to regularly and enjoyed) but titillated me and aroused the senses. This music was hard and heavy and somehow intrinsically for adults. It felt forbidden, so it was naturally attractive.

The Matrix was my introduction into a world of hard rock, hormones, confusion and excitement that would later define my teenage years. As the soundtrack pumped in my head at all hours (inevitably keeping me awake at night, sometimes tapping my foot under the sheets), I began to feel curious about this music and where it came from. I asked my sister one day "What is this?"

"Music from The Matrix," she replied.

"What is The Matrix?"

"An awesome movie that you're too young to watch," was her response.

This infuriated me. I was determined to see this movie. I began seeing trailers for the film on television (as it was just now coming out on home video) and I had no idea what they represented. I could not tease out the meaning of this film, what it was about, or what happened in it. All I knew was I had to see it. There were guns, action, loud music, and kung fu. It was like a wet dream. And indeed I did dream about it. I distinctly remember having at least one nocturnal excursion into this world that I had made up in my head, where action replaced the boredom and tediousness of daily life, and heroes were worshiped. I dreamed of watching this movie and loving it unconditionally. It began to feel like a close friend that I sorely missed.

One weekend my grandmother brought me to her house for a visit, and in the course of my usual merriment in her basement of toys, television, and computer games, she proposed we hit up the local video store and watch a movie. My heart skipped a beat. Now was my chance! I could finally see The Matrix. We browsed the aisles of the store, as she picked up movies at random, but I paid no mind to her suggestions. I was on a mission, a warpath. I wanted one thing and one thing only. Finally I found it. The cover itself screamed cool. All cool blue and grey-toned color scheme, badass dude with sunglasses in the middle gripping an assault rifle, the title all jagged in digital-techno lettering that seemed to sum up my fascination with computers and hacking as America transitioned into a new age, just as I too was being immersed in this world of technology. The Matrix appealed to me in every conceivable way; it seemed to arouse all five senses, stimulated me almost spiritually or sexually.

I showed it to my grandmother, who summarily dismissed it with a wave of her hand. "No way, Kevin. Too violent," she said.

I was crushed. Infuriated. Moved near to tears. As I was ushered toward the front door, mediocre movies in hand, I took one last glance behind me and longed for what was rapidly moving out of my grasp. It seemed like I would never get to watch this film. Adulthood could not come fast enough. Then I'd be able to watch whatever I wanted, when I wanted!

*

I did finally see The Matrix, although it was nearly another month. My sister picked it up for me in secret, I watched it huddled close to the television in my living room, eyes glued to the screen. I could not comprehend what I was seeing, watching it for the first time. I had little to no idea what was going on, what the plot was trying to communicate, and absolutely no clue what the themes of the movie represented or what it was trying to say. All I knew was it had action. 

And oh boy, was the action glorious. 

I loved it, lapped it up, couldn't get enough of it. I was a fuckin' action junkie, hooked from that point on. I re-enacted scenes in my bedroom, jumping around and diving onto my bed, arms outstretched, miming shooting pistols in slow motion. 

More than halfway through the film, what I remember most clearly was seeing the scene in the elevator lobby where Neo and Trinity take down a group of armored guards and rip the place apart, before ascending higher into the building and detonating a bomb on the floors below. This was the moment I fell in love with cinema, head over heels fucking enamored with movies and what they could do, what they could stimulate inside me. Levels of excitement and pleasure previously unknown and normally reserved for the most carnal acts washed over me as I devoured that scene over and over, the climax coming when Neo dodges the bullets the agent fires at him in slow motion, arms outstretched, grimace on his face. I wanted so desperately to be this guy, to do the things he could. I wanted to escape the confines of my reality and live out my most wild fantasies. The Matrix opened all these doors and more within my mind, my imagination running amok. 

I still know every frame, every beat, every bullet, every nuance of that scene by heart. The rest of the film from that point onward only sustained my orgasm every time I watched it. It was like being transported into a world of bliss that I could not have even imagined yet in my short life. 

I cannot count how many times I've seen The Matrix since then. It instantly became and still remains to this day my favorite film of all time. As I grew into an adult, my taste expanded, my interests changed, I became more acquainted with the world and slowly but surely transitioned into and through puberty, and as I type this I am now twenty-one years of age, a man by any definition, but my love for The Matrix has not changed. I celebrate the entire trilogy, and can recall when I saved up enough money to buy all the films on blu-ray. I've seen every second of bonus material on those discs, they are stored in the special vault in my heart reserved just for The Matrix. Watching the film now is more like a ritual, but I do not feel as though I am going through the paces. It is like visiting an old friend, catching up, reminiscing on the good old days, kicking back a few beers. It can transport me from any state of mind back to childhood, innocence, ignorance, and bliss captured magnificently in my memory. It is a classic. It will not age, just as the boy playing outside on the swings, listening to heavy music, seeing above the neighbor's fence and beyond as he careens out, will never age, bound to that brief spot in time for eternity. 

It's Not Safe to Swim Today

Leaving my side of town again for some new destination, some new place to call home, is as frightening as anything I’ve done in the past year. Since the last time I left home.
Again.

And again.

I can’t remember the last time I laid down roots and felt comfortable enough to call that place home since high school, or even before. And that’s the most distressing feeling I have right now. An extreme lack of sense of place and permanence and comfort and security. These are necessary things for a happy productive life. Which now seems farther and farther from my grasp. Apparently I’m not good enough anywhere.

I may not be the most industrious person in the world, Lord knows, but I did not fail to pull enough weight. I may not be the nicest person in the world, Lord knows, or the easiest to constantly get along with, but I did not fail to make friends. So now, in the wake of severe boredom and a feeling distinctly like spiraling through a void, given all this time to contemplate, I now ask myself the inevitable question of where exactly I went wrong. Of course, just as natural as the question itself is, so too is the answer naturally lent to it: and that is that there isn’t one. Lack of answers. Lack of place. Lack of permanence. I suppose it’s true that the only constant in life is change, but I’m not getting any better at dealing with the changes. There is something, that seems to me, inherently unnatural about being bounced from place to place so often. If you had told me, back when I was a teenager, or even a bright-eyed youngster, free and innocent and in place and permanent, that this is what your twenties are like, I would have told you to put me in an electric chair and fry me after my nineteenth birthday.

Because this is stupid.

That’s the only word for it. No poetry here, no sublime misdirection or flight of fancy vocab, just plain old fucking stupidity. Other people aren’t like this. What did I do to deserve it? I swear, by gods, one day I will find whoever dealt me this hand and their death shall not be swift. I will exact my vengeance slowly. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and so I shall wait. Patient and brooding, like the phantom of the proverbial opera, until the stage is set and I can give all these fuckers their what for.

Failure, it would seem, is also the new constant in my life. I cannot point to a single act I committed over the past twelve months and say with any certainty that it was, or even vaguely resembles, an accomplishment. That it was something I completed and did well. Remember back in grade school when the teacher would grade us with an S or a U? I’d even settle for satisfactory. As in, not stellar, and not above nor beyond, but merely passable, acceptable. I haven’t had that in so long.

Let’s connect the dots in this abysmal wreck I once called a Plan of Action:

Move to Indiana. Get a job. Work over the summer. Go to school. Make good grades. Successfully transition to my new house. Rinse and repeat.

Check. Check. Failed. Check. Failed. Failed. We’re 50/50 so far, and it doesn’t get much better when you throw in all the unforeseen variables. Have a nervous breakdown: check. End up homeless. Twice. Check. Wow, look at you buddy.

And now, in the midst of this smoking disasterscene, I’m being bombarded by requests and importations to flee back to the southwest, into the arms of…I don’t know. Security? Maybe. Success? Possibly. With enough work. But happiness? Fulfillment? No. Most certainly not. Maybe I’m not capable of being happy yet, maybe I haven’t learned how. But some inexorable force, some unnamed element, some divine tugging, some unexplainable cosmic power keeps me tethered to Indiana. I cannot leave her. She is my Mecca and Medina, my Plymouth Rock, my beacon, my lighthouse, my shelter from the storm that is my life. And make no mistake, these waters are not calm. They are treacherous and filled with peril. Batten down the hatches, men.

We’re in for the long haul.

P.S.

Fuck you.

He and Me

He obsessively brushed his teeth every day.

He did this because he knew many people in his life who did not brush their teeth daily, and he found this habit abominably disgusting. So every morning, as soon as he woke, and right after he urinated, he furiously put brush to tooth and scrubbed until his gums nearly bled. He usually awoke with a fierce erection, making his flight to the bathroom even more urgent. He was terrified of someone noticing his erect penis, standing proudly outside his body, parallel to the floor, and sometimes had to walk with a hunch or abruptly turn around and pretend he meant to be heading in an opposite direction if he encountered someone in the hallway, already up before him.

This was part of his ritual, which, in his mind, helped define him and bring his entire sense of self into focus. He believed he was the sum of all the things he did, which was unfortunate, because he did not do much. He was a college student, but he neglected his studies. He was a writer, but he neglected the page. He was unemployed and terrified of labor, avoiding it at all costs. Thus, as he was not a very productive person, he felt that his identity was slowly slipping away, or perhaps being taken from him, because he was not entirely sure why he was so inept. To put it simply, he believed he was not capable of doing things that other people did.

Of what other people actually did he was not entirely sure, because he did not yet, in his formative age of twenty-one years, understand the meaning of life, so to speak. Whether it was to work and die (the thought of which petrified him), or form close personal connections with others (which seemed extremely difficult), or get married and have children (which eluded him because of his sexual preferences), or create art (which he was not convinced he was capable of doing either).

In the end, he settled on becoming a consumer. And consume he did.

He gorged himself on fiction and literature, absolutely devoured electronic entertainment, and spent hours transfixed in front of the television. The arts soon came to define who he was, and he found he was nothing more than the sum of the things he was consuming. This was just as distressing as his innate lack of productivity, and ultimately did nothing to help secure his place in the world. He still felt as though he were drifting through time and space, selfishly taking all that he could while giving nothing back.

He was a chronic masturbator, although not because he was sex-deprived. Whenever he had sex (or whenever he ejaculated, period), he felt a deep emptiness afterward that the ecstatic sensations he had just delighted in had not filled. This was not conducive to maintaining a loving relationship with someone, intimately or otherwise, and so he was ostensibly all alone. Masturbating, however, the act itself, frequently made him feel, in the doing of it, that he was getting closer to God, or some mystical force that controlled everyone and everything by subtly manipulating the strings, like some puppeteer of pleasure, and that, while he was doing it, he could almost feel the direct tug on his own invisible strings, the ones that somehow, when wound all together, formed a vast tapestry that he supposed could be called his soul. He was also entirely convinced that absolutely no one else felt this way, so he shared these thoughts with no one.

He frequently wondered whether other people were happy. He liked to imagine that they were, but he was never quite sure. It comforted him, in a bizarre way, to think that there was some magical formula to being happy that he just hadn't discovered yet. Perhaps this being happy, this imaginary thing, was the key to self-identification that he was missing. He began to think that maybe he was not himself, but rather someone else, and that all his attempts to become himself had failed so miserably because he was not, in fact, himself, and could never be himself. But he did not know how to be anyone else other than himself, and since he despised himself and his consuming nature and his existential crises, he felt that his self was most definitely being sucked into a black hole of nothingness and that his entire self was actually made of nothing, that nothingness had somehow become substance, and it was so all-encompassing he could almost reach out and feel it, feel the nothingness flowing through and of him.

So if he was not himself, then who could he be? It suddenly dawned on him that he was me, and I was him, and this startling revelation was so incomprehensible, the ramifications so unfathomable, that he exploded. And all the tiny pieces of himself went spiraling through the time and space of nothingness, and landed squarely in my lap, and I thought to myself how unfortunate that I should be so unlucky as to be this poor sap.