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MAN STEPS OUT OF PHONE BOOTH INTO GARDEN

As any Homo sapiens who lives in proximity to animals in the wild is well aware, sapience isn't nearly all it's cracked up to be. Which brings me to cracking up. In both senses of the phrase.

As such individuals also know, there is an edge to intelligence that is never passed in the doldrums of city life; one merely has to outwit outlaws there, i.e., other and similarly sapiently constrained individuals; but out here where the wild actually lives, the laws are much higher, they touch upon what city folk might call mad cunning, as best embodied in the supernemeses of pop lit, such as Moriarty, Rex Luthor, The Joker and such like creations, beings most city folk would call fictional, not knowing of course that they stem from us ourselves but are never actually invoked in the city (which is why the pulp nemeses always operate in the city), and that we carry that dark cunning within us each at all times.

Thus it was that HE stood there--picture a full page, full-color Marvel comic panel, maybe even a cover, viewed from below with the towering figure of a man, the as yet nameless nemesis-- in rising silhouette atop a dozen or so shiitake logs strewn crazily at his feet.

As we shall see when we get further into this fascinating comic, He is laughing madly at this clear evidence of multimonkey frustration at not finding any shiitake when they visited His garden en masse, en BIG masse, while their as yet unnamed supernemesis was at the office, when their hordes covered the land like a big brown furry blanket and found nothing: no spinach (the deer got it; see post Feb 10), no onions (didn't plant any this year, mwa-ha-ha-ha), and no shiitake, because the madly laughing entity has become more than sapient (see post Feb 21), even now ripping open his gardening shirt to reveal that he has become: Supermonkey!