In Dust In Our Eyes, Dean gives a heartfelt message to his best friend Paula about how he wants to live a life full of purpose and meaning.

DEAN:  You gotta just stay true to yourself. This world, it almost seems that it wants to fit us into some sort of ABC path. I don’t know about you but growing up and living life to pay my bills is a real hard way to live. I wanna live with purpose, that’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I wanna do things that matter to me and others.

You know, my brother Darren, he’s a d’k like your sister Kyra, no offense, it’s like he wants to be my enemy and I’m his only brother…anyway, he’s got everything figured out for himself, he’s going off to college, wants to be an engineer, buy a house, have a wife, kids, barbecue and boat and all those things are all well and good. But I don’t know, I’m not really into that kind of figured out patterned life…I mean, how many people do we know have fit that lifestyle? Right? And it’s like, then what?? What comes next? You raise your kids and they too will go to school and follow the same patterns, you retire, get old hopefully and turn to dust…that’s it. That stuff scares me.

I wanna take risks. I wanna find something I can do in my life that will make me so damn happy I won’t have to be miserable one day while going to work, unlike my Pops, there isn’t a day that goes by where he’s not moaning about his job, he comes home and drinks himself into oblivion and my mother, God bless her, she puts up with it, but deep down she isn’t happy either, cause she never did the things she wanted to do for her…you know why? Cause she followed the same stupid pattern we all trap ourselves into. Right?

She wanted to be an artist, a painter…I found some of her paintings up in the attic one night and they were freaking amazing, I don’t know much about art or anything but Paula, these were good! Just as good as those paintings we study in art class, you know, in those books and whatever, she’s just as good as that stuff and it made me wonder WHY? Why didn’t my mom go after it? I know that’s what she wanted to do cause she’s talked about it on occasion nonchalantly.

I don’t want to be like that in my life. I don’t want to sit on my talent, if I have any, I’m still searching, but when I find it I am going for it. I’m not going to sit on my hands and watch my life go by, live out some crappy pattern and die inside…life’s too short, either live it or waste it and I aim to live it.

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In the one act eplay Dust In Our Eyes, Dean tries to help out his friend Paula by steering her away from being so down on herself all of the time.  1 Woman, 1 Man.  Teen Drama.  

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