by Dustin Danger

It’s gotta be close to 4 a.m.  I’ve been drinking since 8.  I watch the smoke from my regular non-menthol cigarette swirl into the soon-to-be emerging late summer dawn.  I’m not a smoker but circumstance can change a man in the blink of an eye.  Late nights like these, the Bud Heavies flow freely, as well as the conversations, and I’m always given a cigarette, whether I ask for the addiction or not, and as I take in the tobacco concoction and then return it to the world – loose, and slowly through my drunken lips – I always watch the smoke, flowing both into and around any and all obstacles, consumed by the night, just like the drinks, the words, just like us.  Circumstance… my current one has me surrounded on all sides.  There’s the woman I’m kinda sorta talking to, and there’s another woman I kinda sorta want to be talking to and her sister… there’s a man – some mid-life crisis complete with soft beer belly and black mustache who wants to fight me, and the man’s buddy’s girl who instigated his building desire by complaining I was looking at her (a blonde, she looked familiar)… and there’s the man’s buddy, my buddy, and three random people to whom I’ve promised a ride home, the older female of the three presently and proudly claiming to have a handgun in her purse.  The bartenders are already home asleep; we are outside by the parking lot picnic tables, and there’s no one here but us – we are the animals from these surrounding woods.  But even more intriguing and complicated than this current circumstance is the prevailing thought pin-balling through my mind as I process it…

What the hell am I doing with my life? 

My name is Dustin Danger.  I’m an entertainer, musician, artist, and writer from Oakwood; one half of The Villens, and a founding member of the Rebelsfare Collective, an organization aimed at providing a supportive outlet for creativity and the arts in East Central Illinois.Continue Reading