As someone with experience in these matters - on both sides of the retail divide - Gabriel simply stays home for Black Friday. And it's not because he doesn't like to buy things. We discussed it all in the podcast you may absorb at some future date: he feels that the "deals" are illusory and that he doesn't especially relish the thought of his heel on a retail worker's trachea while he pours into the Consumer Battle Arena. He has been that motherfucker in there, the one with the human throat, and even if there is still a pitched melee with or without him he can (at the very least) guarantee one less heel.

The comic does establish a point of distinction between us, though, which is that I think televisions are all the same and there couldn't possibly be any noteworthy distinctions between them. Now, monitors are magic portals and must be selected with care by druids at precisely midnight. I think that's well understood. But televisions? So long as the move-'ems go wooga wooga woog on the picture hole, we're good. A power supply obviously can't be left to chance, and even a keyboard has delicious subtleties - I need a spacebar as firm and resolute as a frontier husband. But televisions are there, chiefly, to make the move-'ems woog.

Whatever is required for you to have done yesterday correctly, I hope you succeeded; if it required that you do something with a hat, I pray that the hat did not resist overmuch and that your effects upon the hat were profound and lasting. If you engaged in the standard predation-upon-birds or the various Unbirds they have on offer these days, I pray that your "gains" were not diminished overmuch by the revelry. If it was just Thursday, I hope that it was as noteworthy or nominal, dependent entirely on your aims.

(CW)TB out.