Author Archives: Jeremy Rosen

Interview with a Lemming

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by Dave McNally

Dave

Mr. McNally orders books three at a time from the local book store in order to get the special discount. He enjoys a steady blend of British trip hop music and bluegrass. Once he enjoyed a peanut.

For years the lemming has been an underappreciated creature. Unfairly maligned as suicidal, small and furry, the lemming’s reputation has suffered through the years. These animals are actually some of the sturdiest in nature, able to survive throughout the arctic winter unscathed and to outwit foxes and predatory birds quite easily. Axes & Alleys took the opportunity to speak with a lemming this month to find out exactly what it is that makes them tick.

Axes & Alleys: So, lemming, tell me a little bit about yourself.

Lemming: Well, it’s a full life. Foraging, running, smelling, nesting. I especially like the tunneling.

A&A: Do people ever confuse you, a lemming, with a lemur?

Lemming: A what?

A&A: A lemur. You know, furry little critters similar to yourselves?

Lemming: Critter? Similar? To us? Lemmings are a quite singular animal, sir!

A&A: Okay, then, what other kinds of animals do lemmings talk to?

Lemming: It’s actually impossible for us to communicate with most other animals. Very few animals speak English. Donkeys speak Flemish and armadillos know Urdu fluently. Lemmings speak English and the only other animal that I know of beside humans that speaks English is the katydid.

A&A: I must admit I’ve never heard a katydid speaking English.

Lemming: Well, of course not. Not with that imperfect hearing you people have. You just hear some clicking and buzzing. Katydids do speak English. It’s just too high-pitched for you to hear. They’ve got some very interesting things to say about physics.

A&A: They have a concept of physics?
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Public Service Announcement

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An Axes & Alleys Public Service Announcement

The home is obviously a dangerous place. So, as part of our court-ordered public awareness series, we will now explore way that you can protect your family from fire. Be wise lest you burn yourself alive, die in agony and leave this world with the stench of your own burning flesh fresh on the ol’ nostrils.

Fire loves oxygen, so it’s best not to pump your home full of a 100% oxygen mixture. Try as hard as you can to set the atmosphere in your home to 74% nitrogen, 32% oxygen and 2% argon and other trace gasses. Some methane or sulfur may be included from time to time.

You may wish to impress friends with your ability to drink a flaming shot of liquor. After several of these, you may think it a good idea to pour liquor on the table and set it on fire because it looks neat. This is not wise.

Although fire can harm vampires, it’s best to use holy water and stakes when in the home. If you absolutely must burn the undead, make sure to keep a fire-retardant blanket handy.

While your late aunt’s box of collected magnifying glasses sure is neat, installing them as a picture window and burning alive from the concentrated power of the Sun is not.

Smoking in bed is one of the leading causes of death in people who die in bed while smoking. If you absolutely must smoke in bed, try using a water-filtered hookah with an enclosed brazier. Make sure your sheets aren’t too frilly.

Convert your home to electric lighting. It is expensive, but safer than lining your walls with lit torches.

Should you happen to catch on fire, via spontaneous human combustion, that’d be weird, wouldn’t it?
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H.G. Peterson: Extraordinary Poet

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H.G. Peterson

The Sensuality of Pleasure and Pain

From kindergarten to the day I got my B.A.
Seventeen years I wasted away

Pay attention now, for the following is truthful
No thing I learned in school was useful

Algebra won’t come up in any situation
Forget that quadratic equation

Geometry is pointless and rather old-fangled
Too much time spent fondling triangles

In English class they forced us to read boorish old tales
Symbolic, boring, filled with white whales

History, for some reason, they felt we need to know
Drought, plague, the battle of so and so

Civics attempted to teach me voting makes the man
Now I get paid to clean up the can

Music was fine if you sat in good order
If you ever needed to play the recorder

I will be honest here and say that reading is nice
I’m homeless, hungry, covered in lice

Chem. taught some atrociously useful things for a class
Seeing some ions and finding their mass

Ever use the color wheel? I thought you would say not
Art class was also completely rot

In P.E. the only knowledge that I acquired
Be appropriately attired

Biology is hacking up bodies long deceased
Great for psychos from prison released

All those times I sat bored, dreaming of panties in school
I did not learn, I was a great fool
I should have cut the class and gone marauding instead
You just can’t keep knowledge when you’re dead

Trite Phrases Examined

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“One Person Can Make a Difference.”

Obviously we all change the world every day, simply by existing in the set designated “everyone in the world.” The problem is changing the world according to your own wishes in well-documented series of actions. Meaningful, but pure egotism. Ask anyone how Sargon the Great changed the world; they won’t know…and in the same way, your own actions, no matter how significant they seem, will eventually be forgotten.

“The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side.”

So, your neighbor’s stuff is better and you want it? This is such a common behavior that it actually shows up in the Ten Commandments. It’s simple enough; of course we spend all our time wishing or daydreaming about acquiring things not currently in our possession. After all, you don’t need to wish for things you already have.

“Slow and Steady Wins the Race.”

No, this is a race. A race is defined as a contest of speed where the prize goes to the competitor with the highest velocity. Slow and steady might get you through an algebra examination, but it’s not going to win you any races, in the way unprepared and illiterate aren’t going to get you a good score on the SATs.

“Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right.”

This depends if this involves multiplication or addition. If you add two negatives you get a negative sum, but if you multiply two negatives the outcome is positive. In order to prove or disprove this you first have to determine how morality works mathematically which is unfortunately beyond the scope of the world’s numeroethicologists at this point.

“Never Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth”

Essentially this is telling us not to worry about the quality of things we get for free. It makes sense; compare a free socialist punk zine to a real glossy, compare Jewel-Command-Metris to Halo 2 or compare the soup kitchen’s fare to dinner at The Four Seasons. No, you shouldn’t complain, but simply because no one cares about the opinions of people who read poorly Xeroxed socialist punk zines.

“It’s Always Darkest Just Before the Dawn.”

This is pure wishful thinking designed to comfort us in times of trouble. Of course, it’s wrong. Say two people crash their cars in the desert and have to crawl, bloody and scorched for days until they’re rescued. Then, one dies in the hospital. In his case it was brightest just before dusk.

You Are All Stupid

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A Specialized Editorial by Samuel Sharrington IV

If you’ve ever heard the expression “it’s not the dress that makes you look fat” then you understand the concept that it’s not the love that makes you stupid. You are being stupid, plain and simple. Just to reassure you, here are my Stupidity Credentials.

In high school I dated Lenore. An evangelical Christian at the time, she obsessed over the idea that we would never spend eternity together and gave this as a reason we couldn’t be together.

Not being together essentially involved being together when she felt like it and her feeling guilty afterwards. For months. Did I take the hint? Nope. I walked into it like the biggest slack-jawed yokel you ever did see. I might have unwittingly left out anything reflecting poorly on me, but we do have space limitations.

Later I fell for Penelope. We were together for some time and I never screwed up. Not once. Really. While at college she started spending time with Peter. Letters went unanswered and calls were less frequent. In each rare call Peter was mentioned more frequently. It’s easy to see that it came as a surprise when we broke up. Later Penelope and I dated intermittently.

I noticed several weeks into one Summer that while the season began with sex it was currently at a state of fully-clothed kissing. Like a puppy I was weaned, but unlike a puppy I didn’t know enough to raise a fuss about it until it was too late. Smart cookie, that one.

The next serious relationship was Scarlet. When she ended the relationship, I in no way behaved like a stalker and don’t suffer awkwardness with anyone involved to this day. Anyway, it took months to realize we were into each other. Things strolled along quite well for a while, but then something happened. That something was The Moon.

She stopped sleeping with me and rather than tell me it was over (or me realizing it was over) Scarlet blamed it on the phases of some four and a half billion year old rock in the sky. I don’t remember the breakup very well. Maybe it was based on chicken entrails or a Ouija board. Again, I did not behave in the worst, creepiest fashion of my life at the termination of this relationship. Really.

After some intermittent dating, I think I became smart as evidenced by my newfound desire to date a heroin addict. Melissa was rather active for a heroin addict and only occasionally (every third day or so) looked sickly, pallid and weak.

Her roommate Katrina was more fun. She liked to snort coke off of a framed picture of Captain Picard (which might have been autographed). I wanted her and she wanted me. She also wanted a few other people on the side. (I may have been the one on the side.) By gumption, I wasn’t falling for this again!

Right now I’m in a long-term relationship with the third roommate, Octavia. She rocks, and even so I’ve done plenty of stupid things. But we’ll have to leave those out for, again, lack of space.

So I’ve pretty well locked down my authority to say that the love’s not what makes you stupid. The stupid’s all on you. Remember: the next time you feel like telling someone that you have a rare tropical disease, rather than tell them you don’t want to be with them, just own up; and the next time you want to believe such a tale, don’t blame love for making you stupid.

sammy
Sharrington is the author of several books on national Middling-Seller Lists, including Nobody Understands Me, No Really Means No, Things Were Never That Good to Begin With: A Rebuttal to Things Will Never Be That Good Again, and Bleak Expanse: A Positivist Outlook on Relationships.