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.

Mount Springfield

 "This reminds me of Mount Springfield," Rock said from the top of a steep, rugged hill, nearly five hundred feet above the western edge of Arkansas Tech's campus. He was with Steve Goff, a copy editor from the paper he worked with in the sports department twenty-five years earlier. Like Rock, Goff remembered Mount Springfield from the old Simpson's cartoon. It was a mountain of worldwide geological significance just outside Springfield that appeared in one episode and was never again mentioned in the animated sitcom's thirty-year network run. In a somewhat similar illogical circumstance usually reserved for television programs, Rock had lived in Russellville for several years and visited there at least a hundred times over the course of his life without any notice of this mountain that towered over the Tech campus. Yet, there he was, and he could not see any route down that would not require advanced mountaineering skill and equipment.

Far behind the others

 Rock and David Meroney, a Little Rock Hasher nicknamed Cornhole, led two much younger and less experienced Hashers down a steep, rocky descent that seemed to fall into an abyss. Far behind the others, Rock was relieved to find a mass of sand. He jumped in and was nearly gleeful. Then he saw this soft path led to a cliff that dropped into a one-hundred-foot freefall destined to end in a cathedral of jagged stalagmites. He caught his balance just in time to not die. Fearful of death, Rock clinched to whatever would save his life and chose to embrace patience.

He was afraid

 Rock wondered whether he should have stayed in Fayetteville, a part of his state that had become a national jewel since he left the university. At the same time, literally, he thought it would be nice to make it from his front bedroom to the front porch. His cat Joe wanted in, but Rock could not maintain balance. Indeed, he was afraid to stand.

A star is born

 It took Rock a while to accept his house was packed with movie stars and personnel, but that acknowledgment explained everything. Clearly, these people were in place for some sort of great film. Rock knew his cat Joe was a new celebrity as they walked to the front door.

Covid

 Rock was hopeful he did not have Covid, but he thought he might. In the early hours of his night's sleep, he and his cat Joe had flown back with the Arkansas-Little Rock men's basketball team from a game in Houston, Texas. Before that, he sat on a crowded press row in a large gymnasium filled to capacity. Rock had not exposed himself to this extent since the pandemic began eighteen months earlier. He considered that as lay in the predawn darkness. He did not feel well, and Joe seemed miserable.

No longer necessary

 It seemed as if Rock spent the entire night switching from one graduate class to another. Every time he added another, he was immediately disappointed to find their professors were no more than his intellectual equal. He knew college was no longer necessary for him.

Misplaced bounty

 The future of mankind hinged on the outcome of an episode of Wanted Dead or Alive entitled Bounty on Josh, a thirty-minute television western first broadcast on January 25, 1961. It was easy for Rock to see how important it was to learn whether Josh Randle, played by actor Steve McQueen, could overcome a head injury and remember who he was. Otherwise, mankind was in dire straights.

Easy

 Runs set by members of the Little Rock Hash House Harriers had become impossible to follow. As Rock and others searched for a solution and a way to recover the handful of Hashers lost in the woods around town, the problem changed in an instant. It now concerned the format used for Sunday services at the First Baptist Church of Lockesburg in Lockesburg, Arkansas, a town of approximately five hundred near Nashville, Arkansas. Rock knew this one was easy. "It won't take us an hour to run through whatever program that church uses," he said. Someone had set up a reenactment on Rock's back-bedroom bed.

Pet cats

 For once, it didn't matter to Rock that he had overslept and would arrive late for his round of golf. Scores wouldn't count, not since players would have to bring their pet cats. The specificities of club selection and the sort wouldn't make a difference. 

The upper hand

 Rock was simultaneously God and a hypoglycemic version of himself, but God had the upper hand, and His job was to direct Rock through the haze of this early awakening. Of primary importance, God made sure Rock was dressed before he walked onto the front porch and into the daybreak to stop a loud fight between a neighborhood raccoon and a cat named Joe.