(Full-contact shopping, American style)

Last weekend, I went to a hockey game, and a Black Friday sale broke out.

Ah. We must be getting on toward Christmas. That magical time of year when we wrap and exchange gifts, visit with family and friends, and blast defenseless toy store shoppers in the face with pepper spray.

What in the world is going on with these discount-stalking holiday shoppers? These Black Friday blackguards? I've seen better-behaved people at a Hannibal Lector reunion.

Now, to be sure, we ought to have seen it coming. After all, retailers have been building a Frankenstein monster for years. Impatiently pacing behind the curtain, during all that warm Thanksgiving festivity, there's been this contrived, frenzied, marketing-induced mania associated with the day after Thanksgiving. Slowly, inexorably, retailers have reinforced the idea that if you're not out there shopping on Black Friday, then you are an ice troll who makes children drink schnapps and doesn't love house pets.

Shame on you! Good people – decent, patriotic people – they get out there on Black Friday in support of truth, justice and Early Bird discounts.

And this year, the Greed That Stole Christmas couldn't even wait till Friday morning to lay lures. They couldn't wait till Black Friday to do Black Friday. Stores started teasing, daring us to not show up by 6am … then 4am … 1am … midnight … ultimately, they had Friday on Thursday. And only because Wednesday was already gone.

Hang on. At this rate, next year we'll have Black June.

If we can wait till June.

By the way – the pepper spray attack? That actually happened, at a mega-box store on the West Coast. Some dedicated shoppinista, working on reliable intelligence from her forward reconnaissance patrol, identified and vectored a high-value target – a shrink-wrapped pallet of undefended Nintendo Wii. (or Wee, or Whee, or Huiee, or however you correctly misspell it)

Sergeant Majorette accepted her mission. She knew the score, she knew the cost. Collateral damage was acceptable. She bivouacked and waited, repeatedly mumbling her mission:

Purchase, with extreme prejudice.

The rest was reflex. When the indigenous military began to unwra … uh, sorry … when the store's staff began to unwrap the goods, the alleged lunatic allegedly whirled around, whipped out her handy Girl-on-the-Go-sized pepper spray, and wasted the other Wii hopefuls. Then she pocketed the purchase and escaped into a rabid crowd that was busily disemboweling a late-arriving FedEx panel truck. Later, she annexed Poland.

In another ugly incident, a shopper was arrested for attacking an innocent clerk at a "Returns" counter. Apparently, the dissatisfied patron had just purchased a new smartphone app, the iSleep 3000, which provides a library of sounds guaranteed to help battle insomnia (you know, taped loops of rain, waves, chirping birds, street traffic, Al Gore speeches). According to the poor clerk, the patron went into a blind rage after discovering that the "Sound of Cicadas" option was only available every seventeen years.

Of course, I wasn't there. I heard about all this random consumer violence from the newspaper, the Hair Helmets anchoring the TV news, and a few eye-witness accounts from recovering survivors. I personally didn't shop on Black Friday because, well, because I'm scared. And there is no product on the market, made by any company on the planet, for which I am willing to lose actual body parts.

I'm not unreasonably spineless, mind you. When I go shopping, I'm prepared to face a bit of inconvenience, and I'm prepared to face down an acceptable level of violence. For example, I'm as prepared as any other grown man to get chewing gum stuck to my shoe. I am not ready to get mace-blinded by some 300-pound, eight-jelly-sandwich-eating, high-torque Aunt wearing purple-and-peach-striped spandex and sequined flip-flops, all over a $2 DVD copy of Star Wars – The Musical.

And I'm not even talking about your garden variety "check-out line" violence, where one naturally expects a few bruises, some insults, and sixty-eight magazines featuring Kardashian-type mammals caught in various stages of odd behavior (and even odder poses). I'm talking about violence out in the product aisles.

Basically, I like to keep violence at arm's distance, and I wouldn't mind having longer arms. I prefer to limit my mayhem exposure to manageable arenas, like "New Release" day at a video store near a trailer park, or visiting the all-you-can-shovel-down Chinese buffet just after Sunday church in a Southern town. But I'll pass on that intense, armed, Black Friday level of focused, gauntlet-running chaos.

I suppose it's worth pointing out that the vast majority of these "Customer Slays Nine" headlines were generated inside great, huge box stores with names like Sprawl-Mart, Worst Imaginable Buy, and Pan-Asian Slave Labor Sweatshop Outlet-R-Us. That may be pure coincidence. I have no empirical evidence that points to a causal relationship between crazed zombie-like violence and Montana-sized enclosures full of substandard, imported lead-laced teething rings. I'm just saying.

And, as with any psychotic episode worth its prescription hallucinogenics, there were participants who didn't fit the mold. In a TV ad, I saw a nice, tranquil lady shopping in some department store. She calmly approached her desired item, lifted it from the shelf, placed it in her shopping cart, and calmly moved on. Why wasn't she running madly to the next item on her list? Why was she not hobbling nearby shoppers with a modified price labeling gun?

Shameful, it is. Obviously, this woman doesn't love her family very much.