Sounder (noun): A group or herd of swine.  Yes, pigs.  Not the kind of word you’d toss around at a suburban Chili’s while the server microwaves your queso (which is where I am and what’s going on as I’m writing this), but a term with just enough feral heft to make you feel briefly alive in this fluorescent hellscape we call modernity.  A sounder, per the dusty tomes of lexicography, refers to a collective of wild boars – those tusked, bristly agents of chaos rooting through the underbrush, snorting and shoving with zero regard for decorum.

Etymologically, it’s Old English, from sundor, meaning “apart” or “special group,” which got mangled through Middle English into this delightfully specific collective noun, mostly for pigs that’d sooner gore you than pose for your Instagram.  But language, being the slippery beast it is, lets us repurpose it for other herds of the uncivilized – say, the teeming masses at a shopping mall on a Saturday.

The mall smells like stale pretzels and despair, which is to say it’s exactly how I remembered it.  My therapist suggested I browse a public space as some sort of exposure therapy for my alleged “antagonistic worldview.”  Her words, not mine.  I got here, parked 300 feet away from the entrance because the parking garage is less “convenient structure” and more “Pit of American Gladiator Doom,” and stepped inside to witness that special kind of chaos only retail capitalism can birth.

The escalators were broken, naturally, which meant the central artery of this shiny consumer mausoleum had coagulated into an angry vein of foot traffic.  Children squealed, parents shouted, teens scrolled, and boomers yelled at the phantom of customer service, all moving with the unified chaos of a sounder tearing into a discount trough.  I paused by the fountain.  Some sad kid had tossed a giant pretzel into the water, and it bobbed there in existential resignation, soggy and forgotten, like me on every date I’ve been forced to endure. 

I braved the first store, and it was everything I expected (awful).  A labyrinth of racks, blaring pop music that felt like punishment for having ears, and mannequins with faces so dead-eyed they made me nostalgic for the comforting judgement of Victorian portraits.  A sales associate hounded me until I muttered something vague about “just looking” and fled, leaving her with my bad vibes and zero commission. 

Somewhere between the perfume-spritz hellscape and the food court littered with ketchup-streaked sadness, I realized I had made a grave mistake.  Therapy?  Overrated.  Public spaces?  Designed to break the human spirit.  I should’ve just stuck to online shopping and left the sounder to their pasture of artificial light and clearance bins. 

By the time I navigated out of Sears (yes, it still exists, and no, I don’t know why), my dysanthropy had solidified to the tensile strength of anti-tank steel.  If people are going to herd together like pigs, is it too much to ask for mud pits and apple cores to complete the aesthetic? 

Needless to say, that’s the last time I’m listening to advice involving either “immersion” or “society.”

N.P.: “Return of the Mack” – Mark Morrison