I almost died three years ago on the day after Thanksgiving. Well, “almost died” may be a stretch. We’ll just say I feared for my life.

Was it a bad case of turkey poisoning? After-holiday blues? Nope, just a good old-fashioned case of going to Wal-Mart on a Black Friday.

If you’ve never been to Wal-Mart on a Black Friday (you know, that magical day of shopping deals right after Thanksgiving), here’s what you’ll find:

• Incredible bargains.
• Amazing deals.
• Sales events of the year!
• A mob of absolutely freakin’ insane sub-human creatures.

I’m still too traumatized to fully recount the experience, but let’s just say I won’t be going back to Wal-Mart on a Black Friday ever again. In fact, I won’t even leave the house that day.

Of course, nothing should stop you from venturing out on Black Friday to save yourself a few bucks… except maybe your sense of self-preservation. But if you don’t mind a little trip to the afterlife to snag that bargain, here are a few ways you can make sure you don’t make it to Saturday, November 25th.

• Check out the ads early. Black Friday advertisements are already starting to show up on the internet. The best source for scans of store flyers is BFAds.net. Start filling your shopping list with one amazing deal after another! Electronics, clothes, furniture, toys–all at rock-bottom prices! So… many… deals… Oops, you just died of a heart attack from all that excitement.
• Eat a good meal ahead of time. You just downed six pounds of turkey, three boxes of stuffing, and two cans of cranberry sauce, so you should have plenty of energy, right? Wrong! You’re gonna be doing a lot of running, maybe some jumping, and you might even need to throw a punch or two to secure that Tickle Me Elmo. So if your caloric intake on Thanksgiving was anything less that 20,000, then congratulations–you just died of lethargy. Or you simply passed out and hungry shoppers ate you while you slept.
• Get in line at 2am. If you want to make sure that those Free After Rebate goodies fall into your hands, you’ll need to get up pretty early in the morning. Just keep in mind that temperatures start getting chilly in late November, especially overnight. Wait, you did forget, and now you died of hypothermia.
• Push your way to the front. You pull onto the parking lot at 5:50am thinking you have a chance at that $100 Invisible Walking iPod, but you see 7,000 people already in line. So you drive home, right? No, that would be lame. Instead, you wait ten minutes until the doors open and charge head first into the stampeding crowd. You push and shove and bite and… wait, you didn’t just bite that 400-pound lady who’s gotta have her $100 Dell computer, did you? Sorry, you just died of angry large woman.
• Take what you can get. You’re finally in the store, but you can’t find those darn $12 DVD players. But that’s okay, there are other deals to be had. You’ll just have to settle for the $20 weight set, $50 color television, and $99 stereo system. Unfortunately you forgot to get a cart, and you died of a herniated everything trying to carry all that stuff to the register.

And should you manage to survive the horrors you witness this Black Friday, don’t fret because the bird flu, nuclear war, or junk food will finish the job soon enough.