Black Friday (and people wonder why I'm an atheist)

For me, Black Friday has traditionally referred to the day during which I remain home alone, ashamed of the previous day's unbridled orgy of gluttony and largely unable to move.  Still reeling from a carb and tryptophan-induced malaise, some years I'm barely able to get out of bed to attend to necessary bodily functions. The mirrors in my home are kept covered so as to lessen my shame and if I dress at all it's in tattered black rags that reek of Maalox.

For others, Black Friday signals the start of the holiday season and one that seems to be starting earlier each year. Many stores open Thanksgiving evening while others never close at all from Thanksgiving through the end of the weekend, thus blurring the line between Thanksgiving and Christmas to the undoubted delight of underpaid retail drones everywhere. As if working retail wasn't soul-crushing enough already.

Shopping on Black Friday isn't for the meek or those with low platelet counts. It's Olympic caliber shopping on steroids and as you might expect 'roid rage isn't uncommon. Every year the news regales us with tales of shopping-induced lunacy and outright bloodshed. I remember hearing one year about a 74-year-old woman who stabbed a woman who wouldn't relinquish the last Something-or-Other Elmo on the shelf.  Stories like this make me long for the days when Black Friday warfare was kinder and gentler, limited to shoving, biting and the occasional use of pepper-spray.

How proud our Holy Savior must be to see the celebration of his season ushered in with such ruthless and bloodthirsty gusto! WWJD? Why he'd shop of course and he wouldn't be a pussy about it, either. JC wouldn't hesitate to kick an ass or two if that's what it took to grab that last $99 laptop that Mary Magdalene's had her eye on.

If the stores were actually giving away their merchandise and offering 30-days of free oral sex after purchase you still couldn't drag me to within 100 yards of a retail establishment on Black Friday.  Yet I have friends and family who not only participate but actually look forward to it and enjoy it. It's like those sick fucks who associate pain with pleasure and can't get off unless someone's hanging dumbbells from their nipples with alligator clips.

Black Friday isn't to be enjoyed so much as endured, much like visits to see Grandma at Shady Acres, Fox News, Gwyneth Paltrow and every M. Night Shyamalan film since The Sixth Sense.

Attica. Watts. '92 LA. '68 Chicago. European soccer matches. Black Friday at any Walmart south of the Mason Dixon line. Any resemblance to civilized humanity is purely coincidental.

So as yet another Black Friday comes and goes I give thanks to a God whom I no longer believe exists for not having had to face the horror that lurks in the nation's malls and shopping centers on this most unholy of unofficial holidays.  And if you're one of those crazed, brazen lunatics prone to full-body shopgasms who just can't resist the call of the retail wild, I hope Black Friday is all that you hope for and that you manage to avoid any knife-wielding septuagenarians.

Glória in excélsis Deo, mother fucker!