Let’s see…climb into the car, drive to the mall, walk quickly to the mall entrance engorged with mallites, scream “Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war!,” then dive into the mob to grab them Black Friday specials. Nah…

Today of all days is best spent either indoors or moving in the exact opposite direction of anything remotely looking like a retail establishment. On this, the most profitable day of the year for retailers, I plan to stay snuggled under blanket with lots of coffee fueling me for writing lots and lots of bad prose in my attempt to finish up my NaNoWriMo ReallyBadOh novel. While this effort will hardly benefit society at large, neither would my joining the merciless throngs besetting my local mall. Yes, I know many of you out there live to shop and shop to live, but really, what’s the point?

I’m usually up before the newspaper man tosses my paper against my second-story apartment door, thus I’ve grown accustomed to the familiar “thump” that signals the arrival of the news. Yesterday’s “THUMP” in preparation of today’s shopping massacre announced the expected Thanksgiving day paper. If I wasn’t already aware of today’s special plague, I become so yesterday while it took extra time to weed through the pile of ads to get to the real news.

After reading what was left of the paper, I took a walk to visit the denizens of my favorite pond nearby. While handing out morsels of bread I asked them if they planned to storm the malls in hot pursuit of that $19.99 DVD player advertised by one merchant. As you can tell from the picture, my query was met with a bit of indifference. “But,” I implored, “haven’t you seen the other specials in today’s paper? What about these amazing savings??” Still nothing. The only realization that came out of those ponderings was that I had sunk to the point of asking questions of ducks, geese, and nutria, and even more worrisome: expecting some sort of answer. But then, novel-mode mind puts one in a state of constant query: asking trees, rocks, pond denizens, anything, if they might know where the novel should go next.

Last year I wrote about Buy Nothing Day, an actual grass-roots effort at offsetting consumerism, which obviously did little to slow the growing legions of mad shoppers based on today’s expected insanity. Once again “that day” is here in full glory. I’d love to report about it from the front lines, but really, a non-shopper like me doesn’t belong in the line of fire. Somebody could get hurt, and that likely would be me. Who would finish my NaNoWriMo novel? Would would care? But I digress…

I guess I should cut some slack for those of you (meaning the ladies) who enjoy the high of shopping. So as an olive branch, I offer this link to ShoeWaWa, an insanely over-the-top homage to shoe-shopping fetishists everywhere. That’s showing my shopping-sensitive side, don’t you think? And that should be worth a few points or at least enough to be left home alone when the mob heads out on Black Friday.

The “cry havoc…” phrase is pulled from today’s Funky Winkerbean newspaper comic.