On March 31, 1999, I staggered drunkenly out of the theatre that sits on the third floor of the Mall of America. This wasn’t the first or last time, but it was the only time I did it without alcohol.

What the hell was that? A bunch of work friends had dragged me to the theatre after a computer malfunction(oh the irony) had cut our day short. We’d all just been paid,so after a food court lunch, the crew had decided to hit the theatre. I was unconvinced. The Matrix. One of the dudes said his roomate had heard about it and it seemed good. I was aiming more towards hitting the game and book stores in the mall.

I didn’t know then how big an event I was witnessing. I say the Matrix was the biggest thing to hit science fiction films since Star Wars, and I stand by it. It had everything. A great soundtrack with Rob Zombie and Junkie XL. The amazing fight choreography of Yuen Woo Ping. And the bullet time effects, which would be abused more in the next few years by action cinema than a Tom Cruise stunt double. It would be a great movie even if it only included those elements.

But it was more than that. It was the first movie I saw that treated reality as an illusion, something I’d only ever seen talked about in philosphy books or Illuminatus by Wilson and Shea. It had a great script , with lines that I can still quote to this day: “Take the blue pill”, “There is no spoon”,and my personal favorite:”There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path”.

To say that the movie resonated with my conspiracy theory loving soon to be thirty self would be an understatement. I have a Matrix quote on my laptop save screen. I own all the movies(yes, the others exist, and no, I won’t be discussing them today), and have action figures of Morphues in his chair and the tentacled monster(designed by the artist Geoff Darrow). But as I sit here, I think about how much the Matrix symbolizes so much for people today.

Its terminology has been co-opted by extreme people on both ends of the political spectrum. The irony of so many folks using the term “red pill” while being on the trans hating tip, while ignoring the fact that a trans duo created it, is not lost on me. The idea that I, and many others, look at some folks as delusional for the reality they seem to feel is real. I’ve bee na public fan of people who create their own reality(Emperor Joseph Norton, Church of the Sub Genius, etc), but I’m not a fan of people who seemed to think they should impose that reality on others(Evangelicals, the alt-right,White Sox fans, etc.) When teachers like Leary talked about reality tunnels, they didn’t suggest forcing everyone into the same tunnel.

While I was coming up with this, it came across my desk that today is Trans Visibility Day nationwide as well. The Wachowskis are arguably the most succesfull trans people in the movie business, ever. The synchronicity of the anniversary of the Matrix being on the same day is proof that reality is not only stranger than we know, but stranger than we can know.