Original Grin

One day, Monkey felt something new. Monkey felt bored. Monkey wandered through the forest. Monkey found a mushroom and ate it. Before long, Monkey felt strange. Monkey’s eyes were seeing funny things. Monkey’s ears were hearing silly sounds. Suddenly, Monkey started cackling uncontrollably. Monkey could not stop laughing at what Monkey realized was the first joke in history:

Word.

Monkey’s guffaw encapsulated the world’s first word, and out of thin air, it no longer seemed so serendipitously absurd - for the cackle was not in fact such but instead much more gravitously momentous, and firm. The gesture was essentially a splatter of mental ink matter upon that edenic canvas of form. The door to explore this infinite floor of untapped lore had been abruptly torn from its hinges. Oranges and bananas were no longer just colors. No, no - they, too, were their own laughs - with different tones and pitches to honor their semantic bones and syntactic image - cutting perceptions in half and multiplying them five times fast.

Monkey was thoroughly fragrant with antianguish -

for Monkey had

heretofore

discovered

language.