A reporter's nightmare

 Rock sat in the driver's seat of Jeff Krupsaw's pickup truck parked in a lot on the edge of a small college campus near Little Rock. It was 7:15 p.m., and he knew he had agreed to report on a Parkview High football game for the paper. The game was scheduled to start at 7 p.m. and was likely halfway through the first quarter. Rock needed to find out where he was. He needed to find out where Jeff was, too. 

A thousand feet

 Multiple outbreaks of paranormal crime broke out around Arkansas just in the early predawn hours of Christmas morning. Extreme weather accompanied those near Searcy, Gould, and Nashville; by pure coincidence, Rock witnessed them all. Each led to prosecutions before daybreak. After the arrest in Nashville, Rock drove on a backroad out of town, and it was unlike anything he had seen, straight downhill for at least a thousand feet. At the bottom, the road turned to wet dirt and dead-ended near the pond of an abandoned farm.

Condescension

 Desmy Tutu (aka Zach) drove Rock and a handful of other Little Rock Hash House Harriers into a large crowd of Hashers from several nearby states. Just before he turned his pickup into the gathering, Rock watched the Hashers part to make way. Zach turned back toward Rock. “Watch this,” he said. “These fuckers love you.” Rock listened to shouts of tribute but almost immediately recognized a clear tone of factiousness. Without doubt, this was condescension rather than love. Rock felt humiliated.

Too short

 This was new and alarming. Rock needed a light bulb for his front porch, but he was too short to reach the cabinet above his refrigerator. His only available route required a chair to reach the countertop. This was terrible, and Rock was terrified.

When he awoke

 Rock traveled to the World Cup in a stagecoach straight from the old west. He fell asleep on his way, and when he awoke, he found the pocketful of large diamonds he carried had been stolen.

McDonald's in Levy

 Rock needed help understanding the managerial strategy he worked under at McDonald's in Levy. He and his cohorts were asked to work from morning until closing. As they progressed through their shifts, each would become the restaurant's manager whenever an area of their expertise was required. All the employees were longtime members of the Little Rock Hash House Harriers, a group Rock had run with for over forty years. Hashers understood Rock's mastery of quarter-pounders with cheese.

East of Blackwell

 Work underway on U.S. Interstate 40 between Russellville, Arkansas, and Levy was not supposed to impair traffic. Rock, therefore, began his drive home to suburban North Little Rock from a football game at Arkansas Tech without concern. However, a handful of miles from Morrilton, just east of Blackwell on his eastward journey, Rock followed traffic into a seemingly impossible tunnel. It ran under the entire breadth of the interstate with about ten feet of clearance. He and everyone else were required to drive on broad wooden planks. Arkansas Highway Department workers were everywhere in the dim light. Clearly, something was wrong, and Rock and the other drivers began to turn their vehicles around.

Underwater

 Everyone knew how long and hard the rain had fallen, but Rock didn't expect this. He was at his big brother Jim's house in suburban St. Louis, and Jim had just called from downtown to say the city was underwater. "I mean, this is bad," Jim said. Rock could feel a rumble. He looked through the living room window to see an endless line of eighteen-wheel trucks rolling north from downtown along Central Parkway. "Jim, you might want to talk to Karen," Rock said. "It looks like every truck driver in the midwest knows the way to your house."

Little air

 Rock thought he had a million dollars, but he awoke to find he was broke. It seemed odd how little air accompanied poverty and how hard it was to breathe in his house.

Hopeful

 There was no way for Rock to feel sure. Still, he had established enough to indicate he lived somewhere in the past, present, or future along the endless corridors of time. Furthermore, Rock was confident the authority in charge would lean his way after he examined the evidence. At any rate,  Rock was hopeful.

A mess

 Rock was dead. This time he knew for sure. A diety of some sort had begun introducing him to post-life options, all of which seemed undesirable. The final was a disconcerted version of the den where he died, far messier than the mere clutter of his everyday experience. Some of the furniture looked as if it had been knocked out of place. Shelved books were scattered across the floor and rug, and Rock knew it was no worthwhile place to spend eternity. Furthermore, he was also prone to the hardwood near his front door and found it hard to breathe.

Medieval Europe

 Rock and Elizabeth Kimble watched through the snack-bar window as a theatre group practiced on UALR's grounds outside the campus student center. They saw perhaps twenty young men and women dressed in the burlap and leather of characters from medieval Europe. "Where would you put the over-under on the number of them who have had sex with each other?" Rock asked. Elizabeth smiled, shook her head in a pretense of disdain, and said, "Do you mean today?"

Ford Fairlane

 The bill would arrive soon for some rudimentary front-end work auto mechanics had performed for Rock, who imagined it would come to no more than two or three hundred dollars. One of the mechanics wiped his hands with a rag and told Rock his effort had been a snap. As the man spoke, Rock became aware for the first time the front of his car—a navy-blue 1968 Ford Fairlane—was crushed and buckled to within perhaps three feet of its windshield. He could not remember an accident, and it occurred instantly that he had been taken advantage of for these men to have done any work. This damage would cost far more than the car was worth.

On top of that

 This panicked Rock most. It was well past the paper's deadline, and his story was unsent. He wasn't even sure he had written it. On top of that, his blood glucose level was so low it caused him to stumble as he looked for his laptop and the notebook with his game notes. He fought against his walk's wobble as he staggered to his car at dawn, self-conscious and aware enough to fear embarrassment if a neighbor or neighbors were to witness his hypoglycemic struggle.

Rancidness

 Rock had successfully induced each Little Rock Hash House Harrier to drink rancid motor oil drilled by the former U.S. president Donald Trump. He was concerned but not quite sure what rancidness meant.

A wooden twig

 As Rock stood in line at an apparently immensely popular buffet, a pleasant but not particularly pretty nurse struck up a conversation. Shortly after it began, she said, "Hold still for a minute. You have something in your left ear." Rock paused as the nurse extracted the thing she had noticed. When she showed it to him, he was stunned. It was a wooden twig, perhaps three inches long with multiple tiny branches. Before he said anything to the nurse, the twig quickly blossomed into an ornate white flower. Moments later, with no further thought, Rock swam back to his car in an uphill swimming pool, twenty feet wide and a quarter-mile long. Gravity did not affect the water, which did not seem odd to Rock.

Longshot

 There was an intense fear among the hundreds of people that there was no escape from the unrelenting roar of television infomercials in Rock's house. Furthermore, it had become difficult for anyone to breathe. Rock also experienced balance issues. None of this seemed survivable to anyone, until Rock found a lubricated funnel he thought might provide a route out. It was an extreme longshot, certainly, but he slid through it until it deposited him into his silent living room/den.

Francis Ouimet

 Rock was surprised to learn sports teams in the U.S. and worldwide had begun to adopt the pattern from the golf shirt he slept in Monday night and Tuesday morning as the standard for their game jerseys. He, by the way, ordered the shirt from the USGA after he watched a U.S. Open contender dressed in one for the third round. It is white, speckled with tiny blue silhouettes of Francis Ouimet and his twelve-year-old caddy from the 1913 national championship. 

Adrift

 Life on earth was done. Rock had begun to accept it as he wandered around his house on a hot afternoon in July. There was an abyss gathered around. He knew his presence was an anomaly for mankind, the remainder of which was gone, adrift in the ether of oblivion.

Press parking

 Press parking for this sports event was on a multi-lane interstate highway bridge that ran across a major river near the downtown of a major American metropolitan area. Consequently, writers, reporters, and photographers were required to walk to the event in high-speed vehicular traffic. Neither Rock nor anyone else questioned this.

Trip to Hays City

 The convicted killer in the Dodge City federal courthouse was never identified as Rock. Still, Rock himself knew the matter of his guilt would be established by daybreak. He would hang for sure. A one-way trip to Hays City (long the Kansas equivalent of Huntsville, Texas) was inevitable, and he knew that, too.

Another Aikman reunion

 The Aikman children and two of their three surviving parents were celebrating one of many reunions. Though it did not seem at all odd to Rock at the time, they had chosen his maternal grandparent's house in Nashville, Arkansas, as the site. Three Aikman children, all at least fifty-six years old or older, were maternal first cousins of Rock's, which he later supposed justified their selection. It wasn't until he awoke the following day that he remembered the same place, known as the Crutchfield house to many of the city's residents, had been gutted by fire the proceeding November.

Clarity swept through

 Rock's survival depended on a chance to salt a russet potato and bake it before daybreak. This matter at first seemed certain, but then clarity swept through his kitchen. There were no potatoes in the refrigerator. There had not been any in years. All Rock knew now was a cat named Joe wanted out.

This is new

 The limousine offered a straightforward view of Oaklawn Park's infield, and Rock sat in the backseat with the Oaklawn owner. A dozen or so others, primarily college-aged, were crowded in with them, and they all watched as a wedding party of four walked toward a stage set up near the infield's largest concession stand. "This is new, isn't it?" Rock said. "It is," the owner said. "We thought it might appeal to our sentimental sort of fans." The party reached and stepped onto the stage. In the very instant of their arrival, it swung up with a violent mechanical jerk and tossed all four at high speed out of the facility and into the racetrack's enormous parking lot, a quarter of a mile away. It appeared as an unsurvivable event, and Rock wondered if it might ruin Oaklawn.

What can you do?

 Rock sat in a New Orleans airport diner, joined by a sportscaster from Chicago he met at a tournament completed earlier in the day. He noticed a look of alarm in his acquaintance's eyes and turned to see three middle-aged men approach. Each appeared angered. The sportscaster stood, said, "Shit, I'm not dealing with these idiots again," and hurried away. Rock discovered the oldest of the men knew he wrote for a newspaper when he was asked to investigate their problem. "There ain't a single flight going to O'Hare before nine a.m., and we gotta get there by ten at the latest. What can you do about it?"

The old cabin

 The old cabin at the state fairgrounds where Rock set up camp had fallen into significant disrepair. Most significantly, a good part of the floor was rotted through. Rock returned to it after a rock concert in the adjacent coliseum and would be challenged overnight to not fall to the gravel and dirt below the cabin.

The voice of Larry Jones

 At times, in this circumstance, the continuance of mankind on earth hinged on matters Rock had awakened to. It did not this time, but he had to confirm he had dreamed the silliness he lived for much of the night. One sound of the recorded voice of Larry Jones, an Oaklawn regular who has trained two fillies to Kentucky Oaks wins, settled the issue.

Nothing but a shirt

 Rock was seated on a concrete stairwell along a sidewalk adjacent to a parking lot on the northern edge of the UALR campus. As he read one of his textbooks, several students approached. Just then, Rock became aware he wore nothing but a shirt, which he tried to pull down to cover his nakedness. Clearly, there was a break between classes, and he wondered how he could get to his car.

Seven carries

 Several minutes passed before Rock realized he had never seen a housecat play in a high school football game. Nevertheless, he had seen one the night before who looked exactly like his cat Joe. This cat wore  No. 5 on his jersey, and Rock watched as he rushed for thirty-five yards on seven carries. Rock tried to interview him after the game, but the cat couldn't speak. Instead, he licked Rock, who knew then the cat indeed was his roommate, Joe. Suddenly, Rock was in some sort of haywire conflict of interest. He wondered whether he could write a story about a cat named Joe Perkins who had just run for thirty-five yards in a high school football game.

California circuit

 This unimaginable circumstance was in place for Rock for the second time in a month. As a byproduct of a phone call to a Santa Anita Park horse trainer, Rock had been fined one-thousand dollars for his attempt to play a golf shot from a dirt road on the perimeter of a golf course on a professional golf circuit in California. In both instances, he tried to play his previous shot from a road clearly out of bounds but with his feet planted on the course. He was fined each time by a California state trooper apparently designated to make sure everyone was penalized for Rock's breach.