What to do

A junior-high basketball game was underway in the school's gymnasium. Rock stood outside with the coach of the home team and listened to him fret. The score was tied 10-10, and neither team had made a field goal.
"I don't know what to do," the coach said. "Our guys can't make a shot."
Rock knew a lot about both teams, even though he had never seen either play.
"Your guys like to shoot," he said. "They particularly like to shoot from the outside, but in a game like this, you probably want them going inside."
"That's what we should do, yes. We're making our free throws, but that's not what got us here."
Rock smiled.
"Well, coach, this is why you get paid so much."

Straight up

The trick-shot specialist put a golf ball on a foot-long tee and instructed Rock and another man from the crowd to lie next to it on their backs. Once they were in place, the golfer hit a drive straight up into the sky and completely out of sight.

When the ball came back into view, it was headed for Rock, but it was moving very slowly, as if it were the product of a soft pitch shot to a green. By the time Rock caught it, the ball had slowed to the point it was barely moving at all.

Steph

There was a large group of Hashers, several with spouses and children, gathered at a banquet hall near Rock's maternal grandmother's house in Nashville. Plentiful food and drink were scattered about on long tables covered with white paper table cloths. As Rock walked in, he saw his blonde-headed friend Steph talking with B.J., a long-time Hash leader he had known and admired for nearly thirty years.
This facility was new to Rock, as was a large, old, stereotypically cluttered general store on the opposite side of North 4th Street, Nashville's second-most trafficky thoroughfare that runs from the WalMart Super Center on the south side of town to the high school on the north.
Rock thought he had good news for Steph. As he approached her and B.J., he reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. "Hey, kiddo, guess what," he said. "I got the Wisconsin game on my radio. We can just exchange cars for the day if you want."
She eagerly took his keys and, within seconds, was in Rock's car. As he explained to several Hashers about the Wisconsin game, they watched as Steph drove the car into the general store parking lot. None of them could figure out why its hood was up or how she could see to find a place to park.
"I forgot to tell her about the weird noise it makes," Rock said. "It's probably got her freaked out."

More hopeless knowledge

Rock and his cat Jo were on an afternoon rock-and-roll radio show with a lady disc-jockey and the standard radio fare of contemporary hits combined with a mix of oldies. Years had passed since Rock last sat near a radio control board, but he remembered all the inner workings and without asking permission started a song called More Hopeless Knowledge www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-ZvV5icOIU, performed by an obscure band from the early 1980s named Eye to Eye.
The host listened for a moment but turned off the song long before it ended. "That's nice," she said. "I like it, but it just doesn't fit with what I'm trying to do on my show."
Rock thought it was cool that the woman let Jo in her studio.

The change

There was a significant change in the game of golf underway, and golf authorities and experts had made clear to Rock that he might serve a central role. He was doing all he could to clear his hallway of everything, including the rug, which he placed on his front bedroom bed. It was critical that he trim the time golfers spend in transit from greens to subsequent tee-boxes.
He swept the floor with all the precision he could muster, despite his nearly overwhelming fatigue and sleepiness. He wanted to lie down but was afraid a delay might alter the changes so dramatically that golf traditionalists would blame him for revisions so acute they rendered the game unrecognizable.
Rock began this process as everything about a hole he was playing suddenly turned different. Its length shrunk to less than that of his back bedroom. The green became tiny and made of hard plastic. Change was afoot, charging toward two-hour rounds, and like it or not, it was apparently up to Rock to oversee the process.

Babble

Each of the hundreds of ships under Starfleet Command was buoyed in dark space within Rock's sight, and he watched as they expanded in size at an incredible rate. A craft no more than twenty feet deep from top to bottom would stretch for miles within seconds. What's more, the minds of the crew on any particular vessel grew at a similar rate. The crew members spoke to Rock in such rapid sentences that he had no chance to decipher their babble.
Someone in some sort of leadership role with Starfleet sat with Rock in what looked like a stadium press box and began to speak of the significance of what unfolded before them. He adopted the tone of a sportscaster: "Nothing like this has ever been seen before. The crafts continue their exponential growth at a heretofore unimaginable pace. We are all stunned, absolutely stunned."

Bugdetary alarm

Walt and his wife Amy and two daughters were somehow included in Rock's budgetary considerations. A mutual friend named Jason set up a computer program that calculated their monthly financial allotment, and Rock read the report on an alarm clock in his front bedroom. It said they could spend a total of twenty-six hundred dollars a month drawn from their combined income.
Using a calculator in his den, Rock saw that meant they would have, on average, a little less than eighty-seven dollars a day available to them. He wasn't sure that would be enough, but the alarm continued to sound every few minutes. Rock assumed it was a sign of urgency. It rang at least twice before he turned off its snooze function, which was theretofore unfamiliar to him.

Good humor

His father and a young woman were with Rock to help him select clothes for an event that required he dress up a bit. He left it to them, and they selected a pair of khakis, a red plaid shirt, and his navy-blue sports jacket. Both were amused by the limited wardrobe in Rock's front bedroom closet and his indifference to their choices.

The woman was perhaps thirty years old. She had short butterscotch blonde hair and the trim figure and ruddy complexion of an endurance athlete, but what attracted Rock most was how pleased and humored she seemed by her current circumstance.
He handed her a pair of scissors so she could begin to trim the nearly endless threads that dangled from each button and button hole on his shirt and jacket. She and his father laughed, and Rock was delighted by the underlying spirit of the teasing that radiated from them.

"You can tell how often he dresses like this," his father said.

"This is the first time, right?" she said as she squinted to isolate one of the threads.

Pizza

A group of new agers opened a pizza restaurant in Rock's house. Whereas the perk of plentiful pizza appealed to him, he wasn't sure he liked the idea of people dining in his living room. For the time being, no one was there, but Rock knew this would have to be resolved. He couldn't have a restaurant in his house.

He wasn't sure who these people were or what gave them this crazy idea.

Out of place

Whenever Rock was around this ultra-distance crowd, he felt a bit out of place. He had volunteered to help along a stretch of a race somewhere near Little Rock and recognized many of the participants and other volunteers, but no one acknowledged him.
He and several others were in a small, old house along a highway on the course. Its rooms were cluttered with tables and fold-out chairs and boxes full of assorted supplies. Rock was in a bathroom when he suddenly noticed he was naked from the waist down. Before he could find a towel or anything else to wrap himself with, several volunteers walked in, including his longtime acquaintances Stan Fergusin and Paul Turnor. They quickly turned away as Rock picked up a stray dish towel and attempted to cover himself.

Super Bowl bust

The very idea that almost an entire nation failed to watch the Super Bowl stunned everyone. Most blamed the mass oversight on a failure of scheduling. Whereas the game had been televised with a kickoff sometime between five and five-thirty p.m. central for the previous forty years, Super Bowl LII started at seven-thirty, and most of the U.S. was asleep.
Rock woke up at halftime. There was a small table with a blender and bowls of ice beside his back bedroom bed, but the ice had begun to melt. A couple from the Little Rock Hash House Harriers slept in his front bedroom. He wasn't sure who they were. He briefly considered waking them but fell back to sleep and was out for the night.

Addled mind

It was nearly nine-thirty in the morning before Rock became conscious enough to get out of his front-bedroom bed. Within the first minute, he thought that perhaps he had forgotten something scheduled for nine a.m. He wasn't sure how important the matter was but began to worry after he noticed a check from the paper on his desk. There was no way for him to calculate the significance of his financial responsibilities, certainly not in his currently addled state of mind.
Rock's cat Jo wanted out. That was all he knew for sure.

Scout and Soccoro

A woman from out of town showed up for a run of the Little Rock Hash House Harriers and was consequently required to submit to a down-down, a Hashing process in which visitors—among others—are required to consume a cup full of beer or else pour its contents over their heads. She stood near Rock and wore a flimsy pasteboard crown that looked as if it may have come from a Burger King.
Before the visitor drank, she and Rock were suddenly pounced upon by two large, friendly dogs Rock knew as Scout and Soccoro. Rock looked up to see Erin, one of the dogs' owners, standing by and laughing at this slapstick before her. Rock and the woman were also clearly amused.

Cat trouble

Randy Smith and Rock had worked together at a talk radio station thirty years earlier and just happened to meet in the lobby of the Arkansas Democrat building as they prepared to leave. Rock carried a large canvas equipment bag with him, partially filled with paperwork from his desk and old mail that had gathered for years.
Shortly after Randy and Rock walked out of the front door, as they stood by the steps to the ancient castle next door to the Democrat Building waiting for traffic to break, Rock suddenly became aware there was something alive in the bag. He thought immediately of his cat Pam.
"Holy shit, Randy," he said. "There's something in this bag."
"What do you think it is?"
"I don't know. I think it might be Pam."
Rock felt compelled to check. Perhaps some animal from the paper had climbed in, though he knew how crucial it was to not let out Pam if it were her. He slowly unzipped the bag to check, but Pam was too quick for him, and she wriggled out through the opening. This was trouble. Pam ran to the corner of the nearest intersection and into a drain opening before he could react, and Rock knew he faced the potential of hours spent downtown in search of his cat.

Excessive sanitation

Someone involved with a group organized to protest excessive sanitary measures had placed small piles of dirt all over North Little Rock. Anyone who removed them or put them elsewhere would find that the piles were replaced each half hour throughout the night.

Rock found one, approximately a foot high, between his commode and bathtub. He removed it at approximately 8 a.m. but kept an eye on his bathroom through 8:30 to make sure no one brought another. He couldn't wait to ask the other members of his walking group if they had similar experiences.

Exhausted and hungry

Richard and his son Rock had driven all night and were in a town somewhere in Missouri about which neither were even remotely familiar. They were both exhausted and hungry. It was not yet daybreak when they walked into a department store that Rock thought seemed closed. There were no more than a few employees there, and Richard and he were the only customers.
Apparently, someone knew they wanted food and brought out a plate heaped with pork chops, fried potatoes, and eggs. An overweight, bearded young man handed it to Rock, who placed it on a card table near a display of televisions and laptop computers. They sat at the table, and Rock pushed the plate toward Richard.
"Here, man, I can wait," he said.
"I wonder if they'll bring more," Richard said.

New digs for Walt

Walt and Rock rode in a helicopter as it flew at dusk over a vast plot of pricey houses. They were oddly exotic, perhaps to the point of weirdness, Rock thought. They were all one story, trimmed in stainless steel and glass, each with glass ceilings that exposed gatherings of young adults dressed in casual evening wear.
"What do those houses go for?" Rock said.
Walt had arranged the flyover. He apparently was in search for a new place to live.
"They're asking for about two-fifty a year," Walt said.
"Two-hundred fifty thousand a year?" Rock was incredulous. "Fuck, man, how much are you going to make as a truck driver?"
Walt explained earlier that he had recently begun to consider a career change.
"Most drivers make at least eighty thousand a year," he said, as if that were plenty adequate to cover expenses in the neighborhoods below. "Rock, you're too satisfied. You're like a lot of people I know, just perfectly content with your boring life."