Black Friday, Part One: "Any world that I'm welcome to ... is better than the one I come from."

See: Black Friday, Part Two: “Literally millions of native peoples were slaughtered.”

Readers with long memories and commendable patience will recall that the senior editor's annoyance with the Christmas shopping season is a constant condition high atop his overworked soapbox.

I'd managed to avoid a relapse until yesterday, when the New Albany Tribune’s Thursday columnist shimmied with the zeitgeist by referring to the mother of all post-Thanksgiving shopping days as Black Friday. Not wanting to be left out, I'll follow suit in this and a folowing article. Here is the newspaper's contribution.

Thank goodness, tomorrow's Black Friday; When the day comes, you’re gonna stake your claim.

Fair enough. It's another buzz word, and some sweet day it will go away and revert to its proper "crashing market" connotation, but not yet.

I noticed something else, and it took a minute or two for the answer to pop up. Read all the way to the end of Fagen’s and Becker’s savvy thoughts from Steely Dan's album “Katy Lied” to learn where one of the Tribune's anonymous conjurers of headlines cleverly lyric-dropped:

When Black Friday comes
I'll stand down by the door
And catch the gray men
When they dive from the fourteenth floor
When Black Friday comes
I'll collect everything I'm owed
And before my friends find out
I'll be on the road
When Black Friday falls you know it's got to be
Don't let it fall on me

When Black Friday comes
I'll fly down to Muswellbrook
Gonna strike all the big red words
From my little black book
Gonna do just what I please
Gonna wear no socks and shoes
With nothing to do
But feed all the Kangaroos
When Black Friday comes I'll be on that hill
You know I will

When Black Friday comes
I'm gonna dig myself a hole
Gonna lay down in it
'Til I satisfy my soul
Gonna let the world pass by me
The Archbishop gonna sanctify me
And if he don't come across
I'm gonna let it roll
When Black Friday comes I'm gonna stake my claim
I guess I'll change my name.

I had to pour a beer and listen to the whole work of mid-seventies pop art: "Daddy Don't Live in That New York City," "Dr. Wu," "Bad Sneakers," and all the rest of the timeless gems.

Meanwhile, this year's looking like every other. The nation’s fevered economic analysis infrastructure is keeping one eye fixed on the fiscal condition of Chinese trinket manufacturers and another on the tea leaves in an effort to determine if holiday retail sales will be sufficient to float the materialism boat for another year.

Meanwhile, the dollar continues its long slide into irrelevance, the Iraqi money pit continues to suck increasingly devalued greenbacks into a black hole filled with crude, and our patriotically rabid shoppers pile merrily into their Hummers to drive 25 feet to the foot of the driveway and collect their amok credit card bills.

Change the dates, change the names -- but Pavlov's dog salivates just as predictably.

At least we have alcohol.