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1/6/04:Our sainted publisher, Creative Arts Book Company, is out of business. Now's your chance to buy my novel at a 50% discount! Check out the "How Do I Buy a Copy" page!

It's easy to lose track of your life sometimes, especially when you drink a lot. Three twenty-something white guys who made a smooth transition from undergraduate underachieving to corporate bottom-feeding sketch out a plan to reclaim their supposed dignity. In-between drinks, angst-ridden diatribes, and the follies and foibles of an involuntarily platonic relationship, these bright, personable mediocrities decide to rob the publishing house which employs their only stable member. The score is small, and possibly just beyond their reach.
        Phil "Dub" Dublen feels the walls of his cubicle closing in around him at the publishing company he works for. At first the carefree plan to rob it, floated by his strange old college friend Trim (a self-styled poet who revels in his own lack of talent and ambition; eager to offend everyone, happy to appear bizarre, disliked and disdainful), is merely a cathartic daydream. When Trim involves his room-mate Dan (unemployed, bitter, undoubtedly alcoholic; yellowed at the edges and cursed with a blackout temper which often leaves his friends on the floor) they discover that they each bring a key to the success of the first criminal undertaking any of them have ever contemplated.
        Dub is the inside man, able to get them into the building without tripping alarms, able to scout the place out and know in advance what to take and how. His cousin's past history as a car thief doesn't hurt either. With his worn charm getting them in the door, half the work is done. Dan seems to power the caper through sheer willpower and booze fumes, but his motivation is mysterious, as it becomes more and more evident that he doesn't expect anything to change in his life, perhaps ever. His Uncle Tommy, an older, more ruined version of the Quinn male, is recruited from his shady life to supply the criminal links that make their plot something more than role-playing. Trim energizes the plot and keeps everyone on their toes with brutal honesty and strange, horrible poetry.
        Meeting at a bar called Rue's Morgue, where their friend Adrian "Chick" Parker waitresses and steals Dub's forlorn, frustrated heart, they drink, fight, plot, and occasionally read some really bad poetry. Dub goes to work, Dan loses his job and settles into a premature old age, and Trim manages to be loved and hated by everyone, sometimes simultaneously. Slowly, amidst arguments, flirtations, and rare moments of grace, the plan is assembled: Dub will get an access card to his building, his cousin will get them a van to haul away their goods, Dan gets his Uncle Tommy to agree to fence the equipment, and on the night of the office Christmas Party the trio survive their own weaknesses and a half-baked plan to emerge incrementally richer and perhaps slightly wiser.
        They all quickly realize it isn't about the money, it's about doing something, anything. For Dub, working a dull, meaningless job and failing to be noticed by Chick Parker leaves him desperate for action of any kind. For Trim, it's a final chance to actually be as outrageous and anarchic as he pretends to be. For Dan, it seems to be something he does for the same reasons he does everything: to vent a little anger, and because he has nothing better to do.
        When the story ends, nothing is solved, nothing is better, and nothing, really, has changed. Which surprises none of them.