John Conner has lost his girlfriend, his job, a scholarship, and has
been kicked out of college. Instead of retreating back to his
parents' basement and a life of mediocrity and factory labor, he
decides to stay the summer in the college town of Bloomington,
Indiana.
On the lazy Indiana University campus, Conner explores the worlds of
death metal, zines, no-budget radio, and slackerdom while trying to
learn about women, deal with depression, and get his life back on
course. While he works telemarketing jobs and hawks glowsticks as a
street vendor in order to survive, he learns who his friends are in
the strange mix of people left at the college for the summer. The
atmospheric and descriptive narration weaves the hidden beauty of the
Midwest and the crossroads of the early Nineties into a timeless story
of the follies of youth.
Conner's ramblings through the desolation of an empty campus parallel
the meaningless jobs he must take to scrape by while he decides
whether to remain sequestered in the relative comfort of college
living or leap into an unstable world fueled only by his own
creativity.