The Dark Triad & People Who Exhaust Me

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

I’m eating granola out of a paper cup with a plastic baby spoon, on the tenth floor of a Marriot in downtown St. Louis. I’m drinking sauvignon blanc out of a plastic cup, wondering if this makes me trashy or resourceful. Speaking of trash, the worldwide human population produces 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage every year. I imagine a trash barge floating off the pacific coast, spilling over with human refuse, my tiny blue plastic baby spoon balanced precariously on top.

An older gentleman called me “charming” today, which is either an unlikely compliment or a sign of very poor judgement. He had a scraggly grey beard and large, yellowed teeth. Like a donkey, I thought. Exactly like the donkey from Shrek.

When the pandemic was in its thickest, I read about folks being condemned to hotel rooms for ten days at a time. Fed through a crack in the door and losing themselves in the black triad of cell phone + laptop + television. The real dark triad is a theory of personality that encompasses psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Sadism was later added, making the dark triad a tetrad, but who’s counting. If any of us cared to look hard enough at ourselves, we’d all find trace-to-significant amounts of all sorts of dark stuff. We probably should look at ourselves hard enough to…