We need to get one thing straight. Thomas Crapper did not invent the toilet.

I shit you not. The toilet was invented by a Doctor Bartholomew Lachanophobia of Barthe. Its original purpose? The dispatchment of unwanted greens at dinner time. (Not the brown stuff.) You see, the good doctor was a learned man, but he was also a devoutly religious man, and he possessed a rather unfortunate and irrational fear of broccoli as a result. He believed it to be the devil’s tree.

Dear reader, I should probably put this into some kind of context for you.

To Lachanophobia, ordinary trees were a symbol of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil from the Book of Genesis. His mother had told him this bedtime story since he was a child. You probably know it yourself. The devil appears as a wibbly wobbly snake in the mystic Garden of Eden. He smooth talks Eve for kicks. It works. She ends up eating the fruit of the forbidden tree.

Now, one could be tempted to write her off as a complete idiot, but think back to the last time you chatted with a snake. What’s that? Never happened? Then I rest my case. How anyone could be expected to react to that kind of bizarro situation is beyond me. Still, there’s an element to all of this that’s cool. Eve may well have been the world’s first Parselmouth!

Anyway, talky devil snake convinces nude chick with no belly button to do a bad thing. She then charms a nude guy with no belly button into doing the same bad thing. Let’s call him Adam. When it looks like Adam’s going to get into trouble with God over doing this bad thing, he tries to pass the buck. “The woman made me do it! She be cray cray!” Eve, realising she’s also going to get into trouble, passes the buck. “The Devil made me do it! He be snay snay!” And when it looks like the snake’s gonna get it in the neck, he passes the buck. “Dude, I’m just a snake. I can’t actually talk.”

So, basically, God gets jack of all this and kicks them out of the garden. And he maintains the rage against mankind and snakes from that point on. Poor God. He’s just a single parent. What else can you do when your children do nothing but disrespect you and your capricious, nonsensical rules? And now, he’s always having to send Father’s Day cards to himself.

Anyway, you can imagine why Lachanophobia would not’ve been overly fond of trees after hearing this crap again and again and again during his formative years. However, breathing oxygen is better than choking on carbon dioxide, so he suffered trees to live in order that he might too. Still, this didn’t change the fact that he simply wouldn’t tolerate broccoli. To him broccolis were blasphemous, miniature bootlegs of the Eden tree. He was convinced that they were the devil’s final ‘bite me’ to God.

Lachanophobia believed that by eating these tiny demon trees he’d get possessed and buy lots of stuff off of the Home Shopping Channel or something evil like that. Television didn’t exist yet but Lachanophobia was such a visionary that he could tell crazy stuff like that was going to happen long before it actually did. And anyway, this story has no logic. So, whatevs.

Over his lifetime, Lachanophobia devised many different yet highly ineffective methods for getting rid of broccoli. As modern science now well knows—and as Lachanophobia couldn’t have hoped to have known back then—broccoli is indestructible. You can chuck it in the bin, give it to the family dog, stomp on it, run a tank over it, even nuke the bastard, but all to no avail. The very fires of Mordor will not cause it to so much as blanch. Broccoli represents evolution at its trolling best.

Now, knowing that his only hope was to get all broccolis as far away from his tremulous person as possible, this was the point at which Lachanophobia finally invented the toilet. And then he invented experimental flying monkeys. He couldn’t touch the broccolis himself. No freaking way. That’s what the monkeys were for. So, following the evening’s repast, he’d have his experimental flying monkeys remove the demon trees so that they could be flushed to lands beyond the world’s rim via this device. Logical, yes? Well. Logical until you bring experimental flying monkeys into the equation.

Unfortunately, what experimental flying monkeys see, experimental flying monkeys do, and upon observing their master laying ‘chocolate logs’ (or ‘offloading cargo’ if you want to be less crass about it) after one fateful dinner, they decided to do the same, but in the toilet instead of Lachanophobia’s customary wicker basket. When the Doctor saw that the broccolis had not been disposed of, and that the toilet and its immediate surrounds were awash with experimental flying monkey doodah, he flew into a rage. He slipped on said monkey doodah and flew out the window, plummeting to his untimely and inconvenient death. Upon seeing this, the experimental flying monkeys did likewise (even though they could fly), and were soon joined with their master in said death because… well, why the hell not? (I’m just making this shit up anyway.)

It was left to the butler then, a young Thomas Crapper (whose very existence had inexplicably been overlooked until now) to clean up the mess. As compensation to himself for having to deal with this supremely unseemly (and wildly unlikely) scenario of ick, he took out a patent for Lachanophobia’s toilet in 1852 and thusly reaped the financial rewards for the remainder of his life. And why not? Hell, I would’ve done the same.

So there you have it. That’s the real story. Not in the least bit apocryphal. Or should I say ‘asspocryphal’? Ha ha ha! Yeah. Anyway. Crapper stole Lachanophobia’s invention. That’s my point. Oh, and broccoli lives on. Godammit. Sigh. It does leave me considering one sad truth in all of this. It’s always the monkeys that suffer.

by TONY SINGLE
© All rights reserved 2016