A friend of mine puts it pretty succinctly:

“I hate people,” she often says.

Actually, she doesn’t mind people one-on-one.  It’s crowds she doesn’t like.

Of course, that puts her in league with about 90 percent of the world.  People who don’t like crowds would themselves make up a pretty large crowd.  Let’s face it:  As obnoxious as a single person can be, there’s nothing like either people’s individual ability to be obnoxious in a crowd, or for a whole crowd to be sort of mega-obnoxious.

That’s one of the reasons that even though I grew up in Minneapolis, I couldn’t live there anymore.  In a major city, anyplace you go there’s a crowd.

I went to Minneapolis recently to visit Mom and make a side trip to the Mall of America to see “Bodies … The Exhibition.”  It’s an educational exhibit featuring whole cadavers and parts of bodies that have been dissected to show pretty much everything you’d ever want to know about human anatomy.  It’s fascinating, if a bit creepy (the cadavers are all Asian and there was some suspicion that the guy who built the exhibit did so with the bodies of executed Chinese criminals).  It’s a little weird to see flayed human beings shooting a basketball and carrying a football.  It’s also right across from Hooter’s, which I find hilarious; you can’t make this stuff up.

Anyway, I went out to the mall on Saturday afternoon, which, unless you like whole oceans of humanity, is an invitation to irritation.  I didn’t expect to be alone, though, so I steeled myself to go with the tides.

But still, there are some things that can’t help but irritate you, no matter how much you mentally prepare for them.

The exhibition wasn’t as crowded as it could’ve been, but there were enough people to provide for plenty of small annoyances.  I happened to enter near this trio of women who apparently thought they were the only ones in the place.  They’d go up to the exhibits and stand about three inches from them, which blocked the view of the other half-dozen or so people trying to look at them at any given time.  Personally, I didn’t want to get that close to the corpses, but I would have liked to have at least seen them from a short distance away.  As it was, I kind of had to dance around the bodies so I could peer through the gaps between Larry, Moe and Curly.  It was like some sort of gruesome Maypole celebration.

I finally just wandered off to other areas of the exhibit until these three idiots made their way further along.

And I’ve always found it amazing, given the size of the mall and its walkways, that there are people who manage to stand in just the exact spot to create a pedestrian bottleneck.  It’s like some sort of weird geometry experiment; maybe they’re grad students in math who are doing a paper on just how to block crowd flow in large areas.

I dealt with the crush of humanity by spending a minimal amount of time at the mall.  I can’t for the life of me understand people who view shopping as recreation and that’s particularly true when you’re in the stores on a day when they contain more people than most towns in North Dakota.  I saw the exhibit, had lunch in the food court and then got out.  I think I was just in time, because as I was walking through the mall to get to the east parking lot, I was starting to fantasize about turning people into parts of the “Bodies” exhibit.

Problem is, in my job, I often can’t avoid crowds.  If I have to go to a news event, chances are there are a lot of other people there.

Back when I was reviewing concerts, I often loved the work – there’s nothing like getting paid to do what other people pay to do – but I got sick of masses of humanity.  That’s especially true at concerts, where a significant portion of the crowd often is gooned out on beer.  Every time I attended a concert at the Fargodome, North Dakota State University’s football stadium and site for large arena concerts in Fargo, I came away thinking that maybe Prohibition wasn’t such a bad idea after all.  And don’t even get me started on WE Fest, the annual country music festival in nearby Detroit Lakes, Minn.  The crowd there generally isn’t composed of rocket scientists anyway, and when they’ve each had three or four dozen beers, the obnoxometer goes through the roof.

The crowds at the county fair concerts, generally being smaller, were somewhat less obnoxious than those at either the dome or WE Fest.  What was funny about those crowds, though, was that virtually every time I reviewed a concert there the same thing would happen.

I’d be standing there with my notebook, taking notes, when some sloshed 20ish girl would notice me.

“Are yoo  heer  forrr th’ paper?” she’d say, her voice thick with hops.

“Yup.”  (No, I’d want to answer, I just like taking notes at concerts.)

“Well, poot thish in yer storee,” she’d say.  “It wash reeeely gooooood.”

Needless to say, every review I ever wrote of a Red River Valley Fair concert contained the same paragraph.  “’It was really good,’ said a drunk woman, 20ish.”

 I realize I sound like a cranky old man here and maybe I am.  I find that the older I get, the less tolerance I have for large masses of people.  Still, I don’t go to that many concerts anymore and I especially don’t go to WE Fest, since I consider most country music to be like icepicks in the ears, only more painful.

Still, while I won’t make a habit of it, I’ll probably find myself at the Mall of America again on some Saturday afternoon.  I’ll be the guy recruiting exhibits for “Bodies … The Exhibition.”