Bomphiologia

Bomphiologia (bom-phi-o-lo’-gi-a): Exaggeration done in a self-aggrandizing manner, as a braggart.

I’m a man. I can eat more Big Macs than anybody can. I can make a hound dog shut up. I have so many girlfriends I can’t remember who they are. I can drink a bottle of scotch and do my taxes. I gave myself a tattoo with a chainsaw. I drowned and came back to life.

These are just a few of the things I list on my resume. Strangely enough, there was a ad in the local muckraker for a man. It was next to the story about the duck who saved a whole town from drowning, lead the townspeople down a derelict canal that was last used in the 18th century to smuggle beaver pelts into the US from Canada. Unfortunately, it was called “Beaver Canal” and it inadvertently opened the door to the construction numerous brothel along it bank, serving the deviant smugglers and the not too intelligent dupes who worked for them. Beaver Canal also attracted saloons and gambling houses run by immoral greedy Canadians.

The man description in the ad fit me to a “T.” They wanted somebody physically strong but morally weak. I worked out four times per day and I did a lot of things that skate on the edge of legal, but don’t cross the line. Lying is my favorite—but not to break the law. Like, I told my mother that I’m married and my wife is in the Air Force stationed in Iraq. That got her off my back.

I was hired to be a man on Beaver Canal! It has fallen into total disrepair. Most of the buildings have fallen down, but the towpath is still in good shape. There is no passport control where the canal crosses the border. My job is to put Canadians into large canvas bags and drag them across the border one at a time. For this service my employers’ clients pay 1,000USD. The Canadians I drag are really desperate. Many of them are fans of rap music which is outlawed in Canada along with black lipstick and Sushi.

The company I work for is called “Freedom Drag.” It is owned by a Mexican drug cartel “Corriendo Muerta” (Running Dead). I’m starting to think that the canvas bags I drag are filled with drugs, not people. So, I flicked open my switchblade and jammed it into the bag I was pulling, which I hadn’t filled with a Canadian and which I was instructed to pull across the border. I was right! It was full of cocaine! I snorted some off the slit I’d made, and then some more, and some more, until fireworks were going off in my head. Now, I had a drug induced plan. I would drag the bag to Buffalo, Nw York and sell its illicit contents in little plastic bags. I fail to see that cocaine was leaking out the slit in the bag and leaving a white powdery trail. DEA had picked up my trail somewhere around Niagara Falls, and, wearing rubber knee pads, had been following on their hands and knees for hundreds of miles.

I was in my hotel bagging what was left of the cocaine, when the two Agents burst in guns drawn. I threw the bag at them and ran out the door. But, as I ran between them, they shot at me and missed and shot each other. They lay on the floor cursing at each other. I dumped what was left of the cocaine into a trash can liner. I tied a knot in it and stuck it under my hoodie and walked out of the hotel. I went back to Beaver Canal, but it had been abandoned.

I got a grant from the Canadian and US governments to “restore” Beaver Canal as a heritage site complete with gambling casinos, saloons, and pseudo brothels.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

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