Yes, Brian, We Are in the Matrix

Last night, I dreamt I wrote new stories that extended the plot of The Matrix—yes, that 1999 sci-fi classic with Keanu Reeves. In the dream, Keanu himself declared my stories canon, wiping out the sequels. Thanks, Dream Keanu. You really came through.

Speaking of The Matrix—do you remember, at the height of its popularity, when the most profound, philosophically deep thought any boy around us could muster was, “What if we ARE in the Matrix?” That was the moment I realized: we were not the same.

Because I had always known—at a cellular level—that the rules were made up. All of them. How society works. What’s expected. What’s allowed. Fabricated. Maybe not by self-aware machines, but by men—the un-self-aware machine.

Like how, at the same time, I wasn’t allowed to wear a sleeveless shirt to school. It might “distract the boys.” The same boys who thought they were channeling Descartes when they asked each other, “What if we ARE in the Matrix right now?”

If their grades were bad, was that really on me? Not the hours spent hitting each other in the balls, or snorting Pixy Stix in the cafeteria, or the fact that a 136-minute movie was the deepest intellectual experience of their lives? No, no. ’Twas my shoulders, no doubt.

And just as two thin strips of baby-tee cotton miraculously preserved their academic futures—so they could grow into great men, important men—I learned to find salvation in the smallest of things.

If their destiny was to be carpenters, crafting beautiful and useful objects from solid wood, then mine was to gather sawdust from the floor and press it into particle board. No scrap wasted. No piece discarded. 

But they didn’t become carpenters. Or great men.

The years passed, and they were still playing video games. Still saying shit like “Brian, what if we ARE in the Matrix?” Still hitting each other in the balls—now in a sportsmanlike way, not a Jackass way. They’d traded Pixy Stix for beer, or weed, or meth, or coke, or fentanyl—or whatever the fuck.

Suspended in time. Waiting to be woken up. As if they were Sleeping Beauty. As if, when they took the Red Pill and finally broke free, a woman like Carrie-Anne Moss would be waiting—destined to fall in love with them.

Funny how in the first ten minutes of that movie, Trinity does what it takes Neo the entire film to figure out. But sure—he’s the hero.

Sometimes I want to scream: Yes, Brian, we ARE in the Matrix. We always have been. You just didn’t notice—because the rules were built to serve you, bro.

Desperate for oppression they want to strangle the golden goose they were born into. I’ll never understand men. Maybe not all men, but enough of them. Definitely a guy named Brian.

It’s funny, isn’t it? The fantasy of escaping a prison built by their forefathers for their own benefit. And who do they blame for the metal bars? Their wasted potential? Probably a skirt that was too short.

But I know this much: any woman bound and constrained isn’t waiting for a man. She’s pulling meaning from crumbs. Finding warmth in splinters. Covering her shoulders with a sliver of cloth—for safety.  She builds fires not alone, but alongside others who gather woodchips too—kindling a blaze fierce enough to light the darkest corners of the Matrix. She sees the bars—and in the narrow spaces between them, she sees freedom. And she dares to feel it into reality.

Brian, put down the beer, turn off Fight Club, and listen for a minute. An hour before you even took the Red Pill, she already floated through air, dodged bullets, and defeated the machine. She's not the Chosen One—she’s better. Because she works within the confines of a cell, rather than just dreaming of escape.

Freedom isn’t breaking bars. It’s forging new patterns—new worlds—inside and beyond the Matrix. She doesn’t escape. She remakes the world in the spaces between the rules.

And if you asked—really asked—with curiosity instead of entitlement, and listened without interrupting, I think she’d let you live in that world too. Not as its center—she isn’t even the center—but as part of something better. Something shared. There’s a place for someone like you, too.

Then again, maybe I am a hypocrite—needing a man in a dream to remind me what I already knew. But hey, what can I say? Even Dream Keanu knows the real Chosen One when he sees her.

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