"God @#?!, I loved football." Thus begins the saga of a small-town southern boy whose life is altered irreparably by the All-American sport of high-school football. Following the injury that leaves him paralyzed from the neck down, Carl Launius learns, with a fierce finality, that nothing will ever be the same again.

In search of a world outside the confines of a wheelchair, Launius turns to Freud, Dostoyevsky, Eliot, college, writing, booze, sex, and drugs - on his way to becoming a "radical degenerate poet." He haphazardly juggles higher education with attendant care, first love, substance abuse, portable ramps, and "too-full-of-beer" urine bags, bobbing up and down physically and emotionally from the Arkansas Ozarks to Illinois to UC-Davis and back again to Little Rock.

Whether slung like a feedsack over the shoulder of a friend, dumped in the floorboard of a van astride a railroad track, or dead broke at the horse races in Hot Springs, Launius presses on, without whining, resolved to "beat the odds" and live a valid life. This book is proof that he has found that life.