The PEN15 Club

If you look like these people, chances are you’re not reading this. No, you awoke at 6 a.m. still full from yesterday’s gorging of bland meats and hot dishes, poured yourself into the loosest pair of stirrup pants you own, dusted off your favorite Xmas-themed sweatshirt and drove your Ford Windstar to the local Wal-Mart or Target or mall. There you partook in the annual post-Thanksgiving blood feast of the kind documented here.

No, it’s not a scene from the original Dawn of the Dead. Oddly, those zombies moved faster and had better haircuts. It’s just an ordinary Wal-Mart in Florida. As for these Target employees shown in the photo above: It looks as though they’ve transmogrified their dreary discount retail oppression into an after-hours Fight Club scenario, but no. The caption says they’re merely “bracing for shoppers,” aka the fleshy stampede of sweatpants-wearers who will fight to the death to buy Hayden and Madison the year’s disposable status symbols, so that no one at school or church will figure out they’re as poor as the folks on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

Folks, it’s your day off. Stay home. Relax. (Unless you’re an anthropologist documenting the latent alpha-male, cannibalistic tendencies of the American hausfrau, in which case today is your actual Christmas.) And hausfraus, now that you’ve stepped on somebody’s neck to get your sausage-clutches on that $398 laptop, try using it to shop online.

Busy start to Black Friday [CNN]