doodledee

One of my favorite parts about Black Friday is how neatly it divides all of society into two distinct groups. I like to call them The Idiots and The Smugs.

The first group, The Idiots, includes the people who buy into the hype and the hope and the hysteria. They're the people pouring over the ads, reading the internet sites, and developing game plans about where they'll go and what they'll buy and talking-up how they'll be done and home before 8am. The most extreme of this group are the wackos who drive over to Best Buy at 9pm on Thanksgiving night with their lunchboxes and lawn chairs, totally at peace with their decision to camp out in a parking lot in the name of saving a couple of hundred bucks on a crappy laptop. Have fun with that, then.

The second group, The Smugs, includes the people who refuse to go out at all. They hide in their homes and laugh at the television footage of the The Idiots trampling each other down at the Megalomart. The Smugs can be further subdivided into those who a) bury their self-righteousness behind the classic "I don't like crowds" excuse or b) wear it proudly on their sleeve. Subdivision aside, it goes without saying that all Smugs think they're better than Idiots. ("That's me!" - Libby).

I personally don't really fit into either group. On one hand I can totally see how getting up at 3am to chase after a $17 DVD player is certifiably loony, but on the other hand, there's no way I'm going to miss out on a social spectacle of this magnitude. Put another way: I don't want the DVD player, I just want to see the doofs who do. So that's why I go out. To soak it all in. To see the chaos. To see the insanity. To watch grown adults basically have tantrums. How can you *not* want to see that? And hey, if you pick up a $2.77 snow shovel while you're out, well then kudos to you. And by "you" I mean "me".

Unfortunately, I now realize I don't have too much to report from BF05. It was a little snowy and I think more people than usual got scared and stayed home. I also didn't hit the streets until like 7:30, so the hardcore frenzy was long since over. It was still a madhouse everywhere I went, though, and the stress levels were up enough that I got to witness a couple of good screaming meltdowns. I also saw one of those surreal "only on Black Friday" moments where an employee dude at Menard's came out with a pallet full of $2 fleece blankets and customers swarmed him like starving refugees attacking a UN food truck. Awesome.

I also got some free hot cocoa at CompUSA to go with my bitchin' new wireless mouse. Can't argue with that.