Ahh. It really is beginning to look a lot like christmas. I see it everywhere I look. The stressed out shoppers, the desperate look of those poor people out there trying to do the impossible in just a few hours. Suckers.
This year has been so helter-skelter crazy that I have yet to purchase very many gifts at all. And the way it looks I may well be out there on Christmas Eve shopping. I wouldn't suggest this for the faint of heart or anyone on a pacemaker but having done this before it can be rewarding.
But here are some tips to anyone planning on joining me in the fracas on Wednesday.
1. Start your day with huge amounts of caffeine and sugar. This will give you the needed extra energy to knock people down if necessary to secure that very last toy on the shelf for yourself.
2. Dress like you're homeless. An old trench coat and your rattiest tennis shoes (for the men out there don't shave for a couple of days) will have the often hard to find sales associates following you around and nearby when you need them. Sometimes the Christmas spirit also has people offereing to give you money "to help you out". Score.
3. You will get the deals for sure. Stuff will be 50% to sometimes 75% as the retailers become desperate. For those you want to impress it will seem like you spent a fortune. Nothing sexually arouses a female like clothes and jewelry my friends, don't let anyone tell you any different. For those you HAVE to get something for but it makes you grind your teeth down to nubs to do so, it's less of a sting if you only paid $3 for the hideous shirt you bought them.
4. By afternoon after enough caffeine to kill a horse, lots of mall food clogging your arteries, and the ghastly desperation of those around you emitting a scent like a million scared Thompson's Gazelles on the range (those poor bastards always get eaten and torn to shreds on Animal Planet) it gives you a surreal buzz like you just ate a bag of shrunes.
I'd by a liar if I didn't say I wasn't kind of looking forward to it.
On another note, my first tenants move into the old house on Christmas Eve. And so I officially enter the realm of being a "land baron". I'd like to have some sort of title before I die so that the blurb in the paper says something other than "man dies while in brothel". I don't aspire to be so famous that it's a headline saying "GutterPoet dies in a brothel!!!!" Extra, extra!!! But it could be a paragraph saying "local real estate tycoon dies in brothel". Yes, that I can aspire to.