Am I the only person in the District of Columbia who actually enjoys Black Friday?

There’s a sickening pleasure in it all, really. Black Friday people watching is about as good as it gets. The cornucopia of wierdos in sweatsuits waiting in frigid lines and jostling for deals that they could just as simply find online is as impressive as any holiday spread. Just as much, the forced eavesdropping of the day might be even more entertaining — people tend to be at their most verbally vulnerable when trying to purchase deeply discounted GPS units at 7 a.m.; especially after a day spent ingesting massive amounts of protein, carbohydrates, and alcohol in the close quarters of family idiosyncrasies. Really, it’s a journalistic paradise — where else can you find such a collection of sleep-deprived, tight-wadded, unshowered, huddled masses offering up such guilt-free quips of deliciousness?

Certainly, there’s a inane pleasure in walking around the malls of America a few hours deep into Black Friday, when the shift changes between exhausted shoppers already spent and clinging to their hopes of finding that last good bargain, and those that are just emerging from their caves to plow through the piles of last second cast away items, strewn about from the tornado of humanity in search of savings.

Photo by sosico.