Dust-laden junk

Completely out of the blue, a friend of Rock's from the Hash named Skip stopped by his house for a visit. They met in his driveway, spoke for a moment about their relative indifference to the NFL draft, then walked through the kitchen to Rock's living room, which doubled as a bedroom.
Skip immediately knelt beside the bed and looked under it. Rock watched incredulously.
"Wow," Skip said. "It's a mess under here."
"Man, that's the first thing you do?" Rock said. "You go over to someone's house for the first time and look under their bed?"
Skip stood and turned toward Rock. "You know what, I'm not sure why I did that," he said. "I shouldn't have."
Despite the apology, Rock was embarrassed. He knew Skip had seen a gross accumulation of dust-laden junk.

The tree

Rock arrived home to find that the enormous old oak in his backyard had fallen and possibly damaged his and his neighbor Tom's houses. The bulk of the tree lay through the middle of Tom's backyard, but two large limbs leaned against their roofs. At first glance, the damage seemed limited to a few displaced shingles, so Rock wasn't terribly worried. It would take some manpower to move all the limbs and the trunk, but there were plenty of men around.
As he walked toward the side door of his house, he heard voices in his kitchen. He stepped in to find seven or eight workers amidst ruin. They had torn out cabinets and moved his refrigerator and oven to the middle of the room. Rock suddenly wondered if he had walked into someone else's house.

Parking arrangement

A long line of cars were parked parallel, side by side in pairs, and stretched for nearly a mile from the stadium, located in an oddly rural area on the outskirts of Little Rock. Rock was about to cover an Arkansas Razorback football game for the first time in fifteen years, and he didn't remember this parking arrangement.
He stepped from his car onto a grassy roadside as men directed cars to park behind his. Within a few steps, he met a young man he had known for years. Rock thought he remembered him from the Arkansas track team but later realized he was Justin Rose, the English golfer.

Tattoos

No one had ever noticed them before, but Rock removed his shirt near the end of a run with the Little Rock Hash House Harriers to expose a maze of tattoos on his back. They extended from his waist to shoulders and were primarily composed of small print and math equations.
A Hasher named Skip asked about them.
"They're hard to explain," Rock said. "I've had them for a long time, but I really don't know how long or what they mean. I wish I didn't have them. I know that."

Something more important

There was nearly a foot of snow on the ground, and it helped brighten the night as Rock drove through the southern edge of Levy. He passed an Arkansas State Police car that began to turn back toward him with blue lights flashing.
Rock immediately realized his headlights were off and began to look for a place to pull over, but cars were parked all along the street. He finally found a spot, but as he pulled in, the state trooper turned off the lights and turned away a block behind. Obviously something more important had come up.

As it were

Greg Norman reached into his bag for a driver, even though he and his playing partners, including Rock and Curtis Strange, were on a green and about to putt. As it were, drivers worked well enough since the hole was roughly as big around as a basketball.

First tee anxiety

It was time for Rock to tee off in the final round of the Masters, but the tee box was unfamiliar to him and his playing partner. Someone had put living room furniture on it. Chairs, a couch, an ottoman, and a coffee table were packed just behind the markers, making unimpeded full swings impossible.
A marshal suggested an option to Rock and his partner.
"You can take a drop in the drop area," he said. "It will cost you two strokes, but the next two holes are a short par-three and a short par-five. Most players birdie them both. Almost everyone has just taken a drop."
As Rock weighed the choices, he realized he had seventeen clubs in his bag. Somehow he managed to pull three out and toss them in his trunk without anyone noticing.

Sprinters

They were at a large social gathering of some sort. Rock wasn't sure exactly what it was, but it had the feel of summer camp. An old man had popped off all day about how fast he could run, and Rock and a teenage boy were about to race him. Rock couldn't wait.
It was finally time. Three sets  of blocks were set up on the edge of a field, but it was clear they had been poorly designed. The foot pads were inside metal wire cages, and it was difficult for Rock and his opponents to fit their legs inside the cage and even harder to get them out. When the command to start came, each of them struggled to free their legs. They all fell, and no race truly took place.
Rock had grown tired of hearing the man brag, and he insisted they hold their own race.
"Come on, man, let's race. I'll blow you away," he said.
The old man agreed, but as they walked away from the group, Rock noticed that he had wooden legs, with round wooden pegs for feet. They started jogging together but were soon running fast across hard-packed dirt. Rock felt great. It was apparent that the old man did, too, despite his lack of real legs. They were both perfectly content to run together, fast across the ground.

A turn missed

It would be hard to explain, but Rock had driven away from the airport in such a hurry that he missed a turn and drove straight from a dirt road into a field of tall grass. Luckily he stopped his car before it and he reached the Arkansas River, but the car was stuck in deep mud, and he would have to hike out.
He could hear a group of construction workers close by and was embarrassed to think they may have seen his error.
The field was flat as Rock had driven through it toward the river, but now he faced a steep ridge to descend. It was thick with trees, and he used them to maintain balance as he climbed down. A friend of his stood at the bottom and tried to help direct him.

The crash

A television monitor showed what looked like a dash-cam view from a nearby car driving along a highway close to Hot Springs.
Rock had just seen it on a screen in a room in the Oaklawn Park press box. He watched as an oncoming car pull from behind another into the driver's lane. The subsequent head-on collision was so sudden that Rock seemed to feel a jolt from it. The picture turned to a jumble of broken glass and bent and broken metal. It looked as though the car had turned upside down.

Badminton

Several Little Rock Hashers joined Rock in the living room or den of a large colonial house none of them were familiar with. They stood in front of a window that overlooked the backyard, and Rock overheard one of them, a man named Zack, say he had noticed the tattered remnants of a tennis court in the yard.
"It looked as if no one had used it in thirty or forty years," Zack said. "Maybe longer."They all looked for what Zack was talking about, until at last one of them pointed out an old, frazzled badminton net.
"Zack, that's a badminton court," Rock said.
Rock looked again and saw that the net was not in the middle of the yard but rather ran across the top of the window right in front of them.
"I guess the people who live here have to avoid the sun," Rock said. "Apparently they play in the den and their neighbors play in the backyard."

Pet snakes

An acquaintance from the Hash named Joe gave Rock a pet rattlesnake, but Rock lost it in short order. Apparently he had let it wander too far down a trail. Joe explained as they hiked in search for it. "Snakes aren't like dogs or cats," Joe said "They're not smart enough to remember where you live, or even that your house is a reliable source of food. That snake took off down this trail, and it won't turn back. He's just looking for food."
Joe turned off the trail onto a creek bed. Rock was far behind, and his attention was drawn to a strange orange creature in an eddy. It was the size of a plastic sandwich bag and shaped much the same, like a pillow. It's small head had almost mammalian features, with a well-defined mouth, nose, and eyes. It seemed wary of Rock, who began wonder if it might attack.
And then it did, and suddenly the shiny, slimy reptile clung to Rock's leg. Rock knew that he could easily knock it away but worried that it might be poisonous.

Ice cream

Rock walked into an ice cream parlor and immediately headed toward a large dispenser of soft-serve. After a few steps, he realized that he was behind a counter, in an area obviously reserved for employees. He turned back and saw that he and the owner—a thin, middle-aged balding man—were the only ones there.
"Sorry about that," Rock said. "I was acting like I work here."
"Would you like a job?" the owner said. "I could use some help."
Rock laughed. "There's no way I could work here. I'd gain a thousand pounds in the first week."
He ordered a sandwich composed of vanilla ice cream and bacon pressed between two waffles that was wonderfully delicious. It just needed a little more ice cream.

Scooter dream

Rock was a little drunk and riding a self-propelled electric scooter through a busy intersection somewhere in southwest Little Rock. There was a road crew there that included a friendly acquaintance of Rock's namee Steve, who had helped him with electrical matters in his house years earlier,
"Rock, how are you, man?" Steve said. "It's good to see you."
Each of the workers, including Steve, were sweaty and coated with dark grime from their work.
"I'm doing well, Steve. It's good to see you, too. I'd love to stop and chat for a while, but why in the fuck would I want to hang out with a bunch filthy, stinky men working on a fucking street crew?"
It was clear to Rock that Steve and his coworkers recognized that he had spoken in jest. They all laughed as he rode away on his scooter.
As Rock turned left at the following intersection, he saw a white state police car pull in behind him. He knew scooters weren't street legal and, no surprise, saw the car's blue lights come on. He wondered how the strong the smell of booze was on his breath.

Visitors

The house was a mess, not at all as Rock would have wanted it to look before two pretty, twenty-five-year-old women walked in, but here they were working their way past his roommate Jeff Lukas through the front door. One was dark skinned, of some indistinguishable ethnic origin, with curly hair and large, bright brown eyes, and the other blonde, sightly overweight, with a build that made him think she was a good athlete, perhaps a softball player.
They were both clearly excited by Rock's company and seemed indifferent to the mess, as though they were familiar with its type. They laughed as he continued around the living room, picking up the great collections of litter, primarily composed of newspapers and empty potato chip bags and soda-pop cans.

The big leagues

There was a strange, interactive major league baseball broadcast on Rock's laptop. It seemed as though it were some sort of loop designed to let everyone who watched it feel as if they were part of the game, actually at it and intertwined with the action and the broadcast.
After a while, though, it got too weird, and Rock was frightened, afraid he might not be able to escape the loop. It reached beyond Rock's house, at least into his neighborhood. He was afraid it might involve everything on earth and beyond and continue forever.

Tornado warning

A tornado warning for the Little Rock metro had been issued by the national weather service, but Rock could tell that the weatherman on television wasn't convinced that anyone was in any danger. It was bright and sunny out the day before, and the forecasts Rock had seen didn't say anything about bad weather on the way.
"I'm not sure what this is about, but apparently there is some severe weather activity at high altitudes somewhere in Pulaski County," the weatherman said. "A tornado warning has been issued, but I really don't think this is anything we really need to worry about."
Once up and in his den, it seemed odd to Rock that no one on Channel 4's early news program mentioned the tornado warning, but as dawn approached, he saw a blue sky on the horizon and sunlight begin to spill into his house. It was at last clear to him why he hadn't heard an air-raid siren.

Old friends

It was halftime of a basketball game, and as Rock returned to his seat from the concession stand, he bumped into a gray-haired African American man headed the other way. They briefly looked at each other and turned to continue their trips when it suddenly occurred to Rock that he knew the man. He was Kelvin Stewart, a former cross country teammate from high school. Rock hadn't seen him in nearly forty years and immediately turned back.
"Rock, how are you man?" Stewart said.
"Kelvin. Son of a bitch, it's good to see you."
They hugged each other and laughed out loud.

Eyes opened

Two sports information directors sat in the backseat of a van and Rock in the front passenger's seat as they rode from their hotel for dinner. The one who sat directly behind Rock reached up and attempted to put a blindfold around his eyes, but Rock would have none of it. He in fact snapped with anger.
"Don't do that," he said. "I will not have that done to me."
"Oh, OK," the SID said. "I didn't know."

Editor's choice

It was someone's responsibility to decide how to use a character from Rock's dream, and there were two choices. In one, the character played by Rock was shot in the head and died instantly. In the other, the same character took a shot to the body and survived long enough to make it to the kitchen refrigerator.
Both were set in the American west, midway through the second half of the nineteenth century.

Dead dog

One of Tom Z's three dogs had died, and when Rock arrived at a party in his backyard, he saw that Tom or someone had curled its body into a ball and put it beside a cooler near the middle of the gathering.
Tom's two remaining dogs played at the back border of the yard by a fence, but the dead dog looked bizarre, and Rock couldn't understand why Tom hadn't buried it or disposed of it in some other way. He knew it was just a matter of time before the carcass began to stink.

The car dealer

Immediately after Rock told the car salesman that he was interested in a recent model but only willing to spend fifteen- to twenty-thousand dollars, he noticed the man sigh.
"How soon do you want to get this deal done?" the salesman said.
"Today if possible," said Rock, who realized he had already forgotten what model he had asked for, and that he really didn't want to spend more than five- to ten-thousand. "But you know what, I think I'd be happy with another Camry. Heck, the last one I bought cost me thirty-seven hundred and I drove it for twelve years."
He wondered why he had come to a dealership in the first place.

The realtor

The realtor asked Rock to go back and check for dampness. "The woman really seems interested in this house," she said. "We have to make sure everything is perfect."
Rock flushed his commode and went back to his front bedroom bed, which he felt with his hands. It was dry but cold, certainly too cold to sleep in. He tossed a blanket and quilt on top of the bedspread and climbed in. It was still too cold. Oh well. With the realtor there, he really couldn't go back to sleep anyway. He seriously considered turning the heater back on.