"This year I wasn't about to kill people."

That's a pretty good attitude to take in general.  It seems even more fitting when talking about a squabble over a Tinker Bell sofa with another Black Friday shopper, as Elizabeth Garcia had done, at a Toys-R-Us site in Times Square last year.

Even without the Body-and-Door-Crushing Super Savings Specials, and shoppers brandishing pistols and other weapons high overhead, trying to get other shoppers to back off from a prized shopping bargain, many people would call today Black Friday anyway.

And not just from the need to make funeral arrangements for a loved one who may have died at a shopping center for the shabby privilege of trying to save a few bucks.  And, not just from referencing other calamitous feeding-frenzy aftermaths, like the stock market crash of 1929.  Just from the sense one gets from the zombie-like compulsions to shop -- from the mindless, automatic need to consume, and from the senseless, bottomless greed grating and grinding along today.

It gets harder to concentrate, the closer a holiday comes.  For lack of a better term, I call this the Haze Factor -- that inverse relationship of decreased work focus and attention span with the increased nearness of friends, family, free time, and fun.

If the Haze is conjuring up banks of fog moving through your area, and/or your own mind, welcome to the club.  (For my part, it's taken ten minutes to write three sentences.)  With everyone likewise debilitated today, we'll attempt only one bit of serious business here, then amble over to a transition piece, and finally wander up to the sideboard of those fluffy meringue and cream pies, and puff pastries.

There's hardly a handful of calories in any of these things, so graze away, even as the Haze steals your gaze away from your work and that whatsit you were just thinking of, and now can't quite grasp or seem to get back.

As we approach our national day of giving thanks, we have some real doozies to celebrate this year.  It's unclear exactly how we'll provide ourselves ample black-slapping gratitude on our good work -- although I expect a couple pieces of pie fit into the equation somehow.

And so, a grateful nation groans and pushes itself back from the table, creaking every joint in its chair, its fingers crossed, in support of the hope that this rickety seat won't pop all its seams, right this instant, and dump us sprawling onto the floor.

Let us all in the Glassy-Eyed Tryptophan Brigade fondly seek out the Couch of Contentment in great sighs of relief, giving thanks for landing safely somewhere soft and stuffed, feeling much the same, too.

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You might might thank me for this one:  Don't go within 1,000 yards of a grocery store until Friday.  I went out for a few things this morning, and consider myself lucky to have made it out of there alive and intact.

Hey, it might not be great, dining on Gas Station Style Spicy Nachos ala Convenience Store on Thursday, but it'll be enough to help you hold out until Friday.

Mitt Romney would approve of the current business meme:  When management executives decide to stage a feeding frenzy on a company's wealth, ala Bain, it's best to chum the waters first, letting everyone know it's really someone else's fault.  Labor unions, say.

If you look hard enough, in fact, you'll eventually see that labor unions are the cause of global climate change, Hurricane Sandy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Dubya- and Reagan-era federal deficit spending sprees, rising gas prices, Fukushima, fracking, the BP disaster in the Gulf, unhelpful phases of the moon...

No, the latest bit of mind-altering news isn't coming from the states of Colorado and Washington where marijuana's just been given a thumbs-up by the population -- it's coming straight from the Hostess Financial Fabrication Factory, with management at the controls, running the Golden Story Machine full blast.

Hostess, of course, is in another round of financial straits.  Management moans once again it's simply unable to weather a strike by union bakers.