After waiting in line for eight hours to buy a tent last Wednesday morning so that I might camp outside for another eight hours, I was finally able to join the line that would eventually bring me to the labyrinth where I could purchase O.J. Simpson’s new hot-as-hellfire tell-all manifesto of poor judgment and failings of the American justice system, quixotically titled, “If I Did It.”

And I don’t mean “labyrinth” in the way one might use it as a figurative designation of a horde of coupon-saturated soccer moms and culturally submissive wraiths, but more in the sense of the actual mythological labyrinth. With the Minotaur, Sphinx, et al. Barnes and Noble set one up for the sake of crowd management, as well as to add to the already overflowing mystique surrounding this country’s grandest rite of passage (next to claiming to understand the Electoral College): Black Friday.

Not since the 1982 opening of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” at the Winter Garden has a populace united in such a hideous display of misplaced priority and grotesque lack of hygiene. But such is the price one must pay for a new Playstation. That and $500. And no, there was nothing better they could have spent their money on. That dog was going to die, operation or no, and I think we all know that Jacamo would not nearly have appreciated the new liver as much as one might enjoy “Sonic the Hedgehog 78: The Return of Rumsfeld.”

Notwithstanding, this past Friday was relatively disturbing. “But the sales!” they say. “Think of the savings,” they clamor. “Where did I leave my keys?” asks your uncle, drunk again. How can these stores afford such ridiculous bargains? They throw money around like it’s printed on paper! And it isn’t as though the money they discount is made up 80-fold in their blitzkrieg marketing campaign and 7-Eleven stylized hours of operation. And why is Uncle Linus trying to start the Benz with a copy of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”?

You saved a couple hundred dollars by waiting on line for three days, yet oddly, the money you would have made by actually keeping your job in no way dwarfs your capitalistic triumph. Watching grandmothers gnawing at the forearms of their children so that they might procure that new sweater vest and still have enough of their Social Security left to buy a TiVo box is, of course, heartwarming, but it seems to have alluded the slovenly masses that the best way to save money would undoubtedly be to not buy anything at all. The concept is ostensibly fleeting. Imagine the money one could make by writing a holiday shopping self-help book of a similar title. What a delicious paradox that would be!

Alas, the forms we assume, and for things no less.

Cuban refugees sacrifice fewer body parts and fewer personal morals to immigrate to this nation, where they, in turn, assemble for the chance at a green card or a hot dog, whichever line is shorter.

On the upswing, at least we know now what it’s like to live in China all the time.

Yet, still we wonder why the world wants to blow us up all the time. If I got up at 3 a.m. after gorging myself on amounts of food there was no way I actually needed to ingest, just so I might buy a television set, I’d want to blow me up too.

When Friday rolled around, I did not join the ranks of the undead; I went to the post office to get my passport so I can get the sweet Jesus of Nazareth out of the country before Hamas decides to hit a Best Buy.

— Max Lakin is a junior English major. He will be spending next semester in London, but don’t despair, he’ll keep writing columns from abroad … because if he doesn’t his editor will cross the Atlantic just to kill him.