{"title": "It seemed like a good idea at the time", "covers": [3885194], "subject_places": ["United States"], "subjects": ["American Poets", "Biography", "Quadriplegics"], "subject_people": ["Carl Judson Launius"], "key": "/works/OL507299W", "authors": [{"type": {"key": "/type/author_role"}, "author": {"key": "/authors/OL33681A"}}], "subject_times": ["20th century"], "type": {"key": "/type/work"}, "description": {"type": "/type/text", "value": "\"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.\n\nIn 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.\n\nWhether 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."}, "latest_revision": 4, "revision": 4, "created": {"type": "/type/datetime", "value": "2009-12-08T04:01:57.197227"}, "last_modified": {"type": "/type/datetime", "value": "2024-07-16T17:05:10.829392"}}