Hit the Ground Stumbling - Nate Gangelhoff 978-0-9816813-1-3
Hit The Ground Stumbling is a book about the author's teenage friendship with a sullen troublemaker from a strict religious family named Rick Denton, and the chaotic progression they both make into adulthood. Rick went from being fed a diet of church and Christian Rock at the age of 13 to giving himself homemade satanic tattoos at the age of 15. From there he had stints in rehabs and mental institutes, encounters with cops and drugs, various botched robberies, and the occasional runaway attempt across the country. The book traces this progression of Rick's through the years, tries to figure out what happened, and compares the experiences to the author's own uneasy stumble into adulthood. Although the themes in the book are serious, a number of the stories and anecdotes are humorous, giving a more entertaining, less somber look at some of the more painful, awkward, or just weird experiences of being a teenager. Everything from ridiculous, Mountain Dew-fueled games of Dungeons & Dragons games at a young age, to initial, hapless attempts at shoplifting, to Rick's strange slide into pseudo-Satanism is touched on with an eye for the absurd. Through the funny and weird and sometimes scary actions, there's a story about a friendship forming and breaking, about early age attempts at figuring out who you are and where you're going, and about how seemingly minor throwaway decisions you make end up tracking you and setting your course.
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Publisher: Arsenic (March 23, 2011)