Time travel

Rock read the date on his wrist watch and thought 8-31 meant August, 2031. He sat on his couch and turned on the television to see Perry Mason on MeTV and was surprised that reruns of the show were still on sixteen years in the future.
This was before a small PayDay bar began to register, though Rock still needed to see a frozen-pizza box from the night before in his kitchen to confirm that he had not traveled forward in time. With that, he realized he was thirty minutes late for a walk with the Geezers.

New club

This was unlike any golf club Rock had seen. He was visiting his old friends Chris and Erin, who recently moved into the two-story house in Russellville, Arkansas, that belonged throughout Rock's youth to his aunt and uncle Jean and Jim Aikman. They were in the den on the ground floor when Chris handed him the new, very odd Taylormade three-wood.
Its  triangular shaft was nearly two inches thick, and the club head, which was no more than an inch high and and perhaps two inches wide, was attached to it with two inches of soft rubber. Rock waggled it and watched the club head sway back and forth. "Have you used this?" he asked Chris.
"Yeah, but I can't do anything with it."
They walked into the back yard, where Rock teed up a ball. With an easy, relaxed swing he hit it one-hundred and fifty yards at most. "Well, it's not going to help my game," he said. "I wonder how this works for anyone."

Bad driving

Kelly was back in town and just as beautiful to Rock as she had looked in a recent Facebook photograph (she was much prettier than Rock remembered from more than fifteen years earlier when they dated, though he thought she was lovely from the start). A large group of Kelly's friends had come to meet her and Rock, and they gathered in a parking lot connected to a levy.
Rock only recognized two of the roughly ten people who had come. One was another former girlfriend and the other a forty-year-old man Rock had worked with at the paper named Nick Walker.
Somehow the crowd managed to cram into Kelly's sleek Volvo station wagon.
Even before they drove away, it was clear to Rock that his two ex-girlfriends were vying for his attention and thoughts, a recognition that clearly pleased him.
Kelly took an off ramp to descend to a road that ran along the base of the levy, and the car quickly accelerated. Rock was not particularly alarmed until he realized the car had nearly approached its top speed, a hundred miles an hour at least. Kelly drove directly up the side of the levy, and the car was suddenly airborne. It went straight up, maybe a hundred feet, and Rock and everyone else were in a state of pure panic. The car then dropped straight back down until its trunk stuck into the levy like an axe swung into a log.
Rock did not feel at all injured. Everyone else also seemed fine. He stepped from the car and began to walk back toward where they had started, about a half mile away.
"Rock, where are you going?" Nick said.
"Fuck it," Rock said. "I'm not getting back in that car. I'm going home."

No need to wait

A small group of Little Rock Hashers, including Rock, sat on a rock wall built along a sidewalk that stretched across a large college campus. They were there with about twenty other Hashers from Texas and Missouri, and they had stopped on their run to rest and drink cans of cheap beer.
Rock sat on a rock bowl shaped exactly like a commode. In fact, as he looked more closely, he realized it was indeed a commode right there in public view. There was a roll of toilet paper with it.
Without further hesitation, Rock moved his bowels.
Barbara Southlerland, a longtime Little Rock Hasher seated several feet away and below Rock looked around and said, "All right, who let the fart?"
Rock explained. "It's not a fart, Barbara. I'm taking a shit."
At that very moment, one of the dogs with them stuck his head in the commode and removed a soiled wad of toilet paper, and then walked away into the large plot of rich green grass behind them. He dropped the paper and began to play with it, which drew attention from hundreds of students walking past and gathered between classes.

Big stakes

Rock and his cat Jo were held responsible for life on earth. It seemed insane to Rock that someone had organized this collusion and that the survival of mankind depended on it, but all he knew for certain was that his blood glucose level was far too low to determine what steps he would need to take, so he reached into the chest-of-drawers in his back bedroom for a tube of energy gel.
A few minutes later Rock realized it was Wednesday morning. Daylight had begun to spill into his front rooms, and it and the sugar brought clarity and relief. Neither he nor Jo would need to do anything for the immediate sake of anyone.

Senior Olympics

It surprised Rock to find that he could sprint so easily. There was a track meet underway in the stadium across the street from the football practice field where he had just made this discovery, which he would later assess as a freakish coincidence, and he consequently decided to enter the 100-meter dash.
The meet was for open competition when Rock signed up, and as he jogged around the track, he saw teams from Russellville High School and Gardner Junior High in the bleachers with Don Carnahan, his coach from high school. But bit by bit it became apparent that he was about to compete against people his age or older. Furthermore, whereas Rock at first thought he was in Pine Bluff, it suddenly became obvious that he was at Holt Field in Hot Springs. He had been there many times since his first visit in 1974. This must be the Senior Olympics, he decided.
Rock ran the 100 in 16.1 seconds but was forever unsure of his order of finish.

The Clearfork building

There is a camp on the eastern edge of the Ouachita Mountains, halfway between Hot Springs and Mount Ida, called Camp Clearfork. Rock was there for about the fifteenth time with the Little Rock Hash House Harriers and was inside a building he had never before examined. It was huge, indeed mountainous, larger inside than anything Rock had seen, or imagined. He was several thousand feet above the camp, wandering around what looked like ruins from a prehistoric town. He could see Hashers below, tiny as they sat at picnic tables and in foldout chairs in the shade of tall evergreens and oaks by the camp's large blue lake.
Dozens of other Hashers had climbed near the top of the building and moved along the the narrow and steep stone stairwells and across swinging bridges made of rope and wood.
Rock spotted his friend Zach far below.
"Hey Zach," he shouted as loudly as he could. "Thanks for that goddamn blowjob."
He heard laughter dampened by the distance as it echoed up from the camp.

No credentials

This was the first time Rock had seen George Schroeder since they worked together at the paper nearly twenty years earlier. Schroeder covers college football for USA Today, and Rock sat beside him on the grass surface of a football field minutes before a game was to kickoff.
It seemed odd to Rock to have players run around above him. Schroeder and he apparently looked odd to the policeman who approached them.
"What are you guys doing down there?" he said.
Rock looked for his press pass but knew as he did that he didn't have one. Neither did Schroeder.
"I'll tell you what, we don't have passes, but we're supposed to be here," Rock said.
"He's right," Schroeder said. "We're both here to cover the game."
The cop adopted a large smile that almost appeared contemptuous. Rock assumed he would ask them to leave. Instead he said, "Ah, hell, you guys are fine. Have a good day."

New world

Something or someone had reconstituted the way modern man views the world in terms of time, so that from whatever point we happen to inhabit we no longer have a chance to progress. We must stay where we are, at least in time. It was unclear how that might bear on our day-to-day existence and ability to succeed or fail, but it seemed the general concepts of matters such as adventure and pleasure would be limited.
Rock's first experience with this involved a baseball game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds. He was apparently destined to know no more than the score after eight innings, so consequently to never know how the 3-3 tie was resolved.

Drunk drivers

One of the KATV Channel 7 news anchors decided to randomly test local celebrities for drunk driving and decided to use Rock's den and MacBook Pro for his testing.
Rock vehemently disapproved and consequently ushered the young man and two young news women from his house. He then sat on his couch with Jo the cat and wondered what the fuck all that was about.

Golf match

An indoor match between professional golfers Tiger Woods and Stacy Lewis was down to the final few putts. In order to win, Woods needed to sink putts of two and five feet. If he missed either, Lewis would win if she sunk her two-footer.
The 18th green was in Rock's back bedroom, and Rock was there with longtime acquaintance Bill Vickery. They had bet thirty-five dollars on the match; Rock took Woods but woke up before the contest was settled. He sat on his couch for a minute or two before he realized there was no money to collect or lose and that the golfers and Vickery were not in his house.

The hearing

Tom Jennings didn't seem like the sort capable of murder but nevertheless faced a hearing that would decide whether or not he would stand trail for exactly that. He was accused of killing a man whose body was seated in chair in the crowded courtroom.
Tom was Rock's next-door neighbor, and Rock was there to watch the results of his hearing. He spoke with Tom the day before and noticed an almost utter lack of concern. Tom was no killer, he knew.
What was oddest about this procedure was the dead man. Someone wondered aloud when the room would begin to smell of death.