Fourth Words from B.C.

After reading some of the (much appreciated [and let me reassure you that the burning in hell fate that was to be wished on you is fully negated with only one email {though that should by no means stop you from sending more}]) replies it has occured to me that some (if not all) of you are under the impression that I am under the influence of some kind of chemicals while I write all these. I can see how this perception may have developed. I did state outright that I had indulged in the smoking of marijuana previous to the composition of the Second Words. And I did open the Third Words with a musing on some hallucinogenic plants. And I have had three gin and tonics and smoked a bowl of weed tonight. But the fact of the matter is: I wasn't high or drunk when I wrote the Third Words. What I hope to clarify with this is that I am not under the influence of chemicals when I write ALL of these. Neither will I specify further which ones are written when I AM under the influence of chemicals. Thus it will be a pleasant mystery for you to decide whether you think I was or was not when you read the writing. On a different but related topic, I have not yet partaken of any of the plants mentioned in my last email, though I did purchase one gram of 5x salvia divinorum extract. Unfortunately the house I'm living in operates under a braod scale no smoking rule. It's fine to possess the materials to be smoked but the actual combustion of these materials is relagated to the out-of-doors. This would not be so much of a problem were salvia divinorum extract not to possess such an explosively rapid onset time. Being my first time, I would obviously not want to risk going outside to smoke and then trying to get back to a suitable place to experience the effects. It could be disastrous if I was going down the stairs within the 20-60 seconds it takes to reach peak effects, which are powerful and can be temporarily disabling. I'm not terribly disappointed, however. I look forward to when the experience occurs but I will let the opportunity to do so present itself.
I'd like to take this opportunity to start a new paragraph. Not specifically for making the distinction between ideas but because I haven't done so yet and the last one was getting pretty long. One must make breaks somewhere. Now that I have started a new paragraph, I will use it to change the topic. Namely, what I have been doing lately (that is the original purpose of these emails after all). Of course I have continued to read books by the barrelful, but I will get to that momentarily. I've gone to see some more movies. Last Saturday I ventured in search of the nearest movie theater and found it to be a 25 minute walk from the house. It seems that here a 25 minute walk is not really that far. I certainly wouldn't have gone anywhere on foot in Winnipeg if it was going to take 25 minutes. I attribute this to the superiority of Winnipeg's transit system (Actually it may very well be that Winnipeg's transit system is vastly inferior to Vancouver's [I've only ridden the bus four times so far] but the fact that it worked with a much smaller area made it easier to get where you wanted to go faster). At any rate I found the theater and went to see The School of Rock. I'll admit that I really had no interest in seeing it until I found out it was directed by Richard Linklater and it still isn't the best movie I've ever seen, but it was entertaining and certainly much better than most family-friendly films. On Tuesday I returned to take advantage of the discounted fare to see Kill Bill again. On the walk I smoked half a joint and was considerably stoned thanks to high potency cannabis. The movie was again terrific and this time I was very aware of how great the soundtrack is. Keep in mind that the soundtrack includes more than the music. To kill (would that be considered a pun?) some time before the movie that night, I browsed around the nearby A&B Sound. There I decided to purchase copies of Radiohead's Kid A and Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Further perusing of the merchandise carried my eye to a display of Saturday Night Live DVDs. I couldn't resist the call of The Best of Will Ferrell wearing a $16.99 price tag. Would have spent my money on these things if I hadn't been stoned? Probably not. Did I regret the decision the next day? No, not after seeing the Behind the Music on Blue Oyster Cult. And the "Turd Ferguson" Celebrity Jeopardy. And the Inside the Actor's Studio with Charles Nelson Riley. And Robert Goulet with his CD of rap covers. Oh, the hilarity! As for the third movie I saw, I will leave that till the end so that I can discuss it freely without worrying about spoiling it for anybody. Yes that means I'm going to be talking about The Matrix: Revolutions later, so be warned.
I'll move on now to what I have read. After Blood Music I moved on to The Art of Dreaming by Carlos Castaneda. I was inspired to investigate his writing after reading a Simpsons Encyclopedia. In the Halloween episode in which Homer turns the toaster into a time machine he is heard to remark, "Look at that. I'm the first non-Brazilian person to travel backwards through time." To which Peabody responds, "Correction Homer, you're the second." And I'm sure you all remember how the rest of it goes. The point is that the Brazilian person referred to is Carlos Castaneda. Consider this foreshadowing as I intend to talk about his writings at a later time. The next book I read was A Toltec Path by Ken Eagle Feather which was basically an overview of said writings. Finishing that I needed a change of subject so I read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. Not as good as his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, but certainly had its moments. I finished that a few hours ago now, and have since moved on to John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids. I've been informed that one of the books I requested through the inter-library loan has arrived, so I'll be starting on that shortly. It's quite tantalizing to think which one it might be. Will I soon be reading about entheogenic drugs or lucid dreaming? Either way it's certain to be good.
Now I'm not sure, but I think I may have gotten a little superfluous and long-winded in this email. Maybe the booze just made me talkative and I overlooked doing anything really creative with it. Be that as it may, I don't think I've been paralytically boring so I'm satisfied with the results. I'm going to wrap up this section right here. You can scroll down to read some thoughts on the new Matrix movie, or wait and read them another time. Until the next one.

Tony "Yeah, but is the cheese flavor really necessary?" Hawkins

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In my opinion Revolutions was no worse than Reloaded. I don't think it was really any better, either. I think the problem with both of them was the de-emphasis of the Matrix itself. In both movies much more time is spent in the "real" world. This is particularly true in Revolutions although they do make up for it by making the real world scenes a lot cooler. The reason this makes the second two movies inferior is that no matter how cool the real world is, it can't be cooler than what happens in the Matrix. Of course we can't discount the fact that after the first movie all the philosophical issues seemed forced. Revolutions did introduce an intriguing idea though. In the final battle between Agent Smith and Neo, Agent Smith asks him why he continues to fight when he's getting the shit kicked out of him. He asks him if it's for love or freedom or peace or blah blah blah in the villain-in-the-final-battle type way and Neo says, "Because I choose to." It seemed a little odd to me that Agent Smith didn't then ask him why he didn't choose not to, but the idea that they seem to be proposing is that the purpose of existence is the exercise of free will. Then again they didn't really show that human beings truly have free will to begin with. So basically they bring up an interesting point, but don't actually say anything about it. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. In the end they wrap things up but they don't really resolve anything. I guess that's to leave the door open to more sequels. It'd be interesting to see what they do with any sequels now that Neo and Trinity are dead (and thus the reason for the spoiler space). I'll end by mentioning some things that have bothered me about the whole Matrix concept. It seems to be breaking the laws of thermodynamics. You can't get more energy out of a system than you put in. So where are these millions or billions of plugged in people getting the food energy to create the bioelectricity and body heat the machines are using? And since blocking out the sun would kill all the plants in the world, how is there still oxygen in the atmosphere? Well that's all. You can scroll back up and read my name again if it would give a better sense of conclusion.