earth

At last, Rock's documentary film was complete, and the time had come for him to see what the producers had named it. He stood in his hallway and turned on the light to find that the title was  simply "earth," spelled with a lower-case "e."
Rock loved it. Everyone else did, too, though he was the only one not surprised. He thought it fit perfectly.
Lots of people would be by soon. Except for the back bedroom, his house was ready for company.

Unreal

All Rock had to do to confirm his victory in the British Open Golf Championship was complete a ceremonial process in which he was required to bounce a golf ball off a row of piano keys and into a cup. He had won the actual tournament the day before, but darkness caused a delay in the apparently essential awards presentations.
Rock had stayed up late to write a story about the tournament for the paper. As he worked to finish it, someone tried to show him how to bounce a golf ball off of a piano keyboard, and suddenly, it all began to seem unreal to him. After all, the quality of his game was far, far removed from that of anyone who would even so much as dream of winning an Open Championship. Furthermore, there was the matter of the piano keys. He couldn't figure out how to include it in his story.

Two cats

Two cats burst into Rock's living room the instant he opened the door. It was late at night, but they were full of energy, especially the feral kitten Rock remembered from several years earlier. Just like before, she wanted nothing to do with being handled. Rock was lucky to have not been bitten.
The kitten dashed down the hall and into the back bedroom, and Rock wondered how he would ever get her back outside. Meanwhile, Samantha, the cat who entered with the kitten, just wanted food. She appeared famished, but she looked lovely, Rock thought. She had the heft and thick, lush fur from her youth.

The paper

The announcement seemed to stun no one but Rock, but he had never believed the paper would shut down in his lifetime. Nevertheless, he heard the news as he walked through the newsroom.

A midlevel manager named Stacey met Rock in a small, dark room near sports. "I've known about it for the last couple of days," Stacey said. "I didn't see any reason to tell anyone."

The sports guys sat around in the office and told stories about the old days. No one seemed particularly troubled.

Racehorses

There was an alphabetized list of racehorses lost somewhere in a pot full of water in Rock's kitchen sink. It was in a digital format, and as Rock sloshed through the water with his hands, he found bits of horses' names that began with the letter A, but he was never able to find the other letters he needed to safely return to sleep. Moreover, he also needed to wear a specific pair of pants in combination with specific undershorts. Rock made a brief attempt to combine two pairs of sweatpants and some old khakis with two pairs of shorts he found on a chair in his front bedroom, but he could tell he had not come close to the proper combination.
At last, he surrendered. There were too many pants in his house. When he climbed back into bed, it seemed as if Jo the cat approved of his choice, which he thought confirmed that he had chosen correctly.

Denver

Rock would never know why anyone had asked him to cover a road race in Denver, but here he was, freezing in the midst of the sort of early-morning cold absolutely idiosyncratic of every mountain landscape he had ever experienced, complete with its blue-capped ring of cloudless haze. He couldn't find the results, but apparently some people he knew from the Little Rock Hash House Harriers had done well.
At some point, he found a computer on a fold-out table near the finish line. The results were there, but he couldn't figure out how to find who had broken four minutes for the one-mile race. That was all he needed.

Miller Barber

It seemed as if it were a hole Rock and his frequent golf partner John Czarnecki had played many times before. The long par-three demanded an accurate shot into the green, since the surface between the tee box and the front fringe was uneven and muddy and heavily littered with all sorts of garbage, including beer, soda, rusted old cans and machinery, and various other pieces of rubbish common to landfills.
Rock shanked his tee shot into slop and shallow water near the tee box, and as he began to search for his ball, immediately noticed several other balls in a pile, stacked behind some rocks on the edge of a pool of murky water. Several were nearly new, including a Top Flite with odd ridges running along its dimpled surface that Rock thought he had heard about somewhere. He might try it out, he thought.
There was an old man playing by himself a couple of holes ahead. Out of the blue, John told Rock the man had identified himself as Miller Barber, a PGA star from the 1960s and '70's who had played at the University of Arkansas.
"He told me everyone should use Titleists and nothing else," John said.
Rock reacted in a manner that reflected complete disinterest in Miller Barber's presence.
"That's bullshit," Rock said. "There are all sorts of different balls for different games. Fuck, you know that, John."

Underway

There was something underway that Rock could not possibly hope to understand. He knew he couldn't find his glasses and that his cat Jo wanted out, but nothing else was clear. It seemed as if an official from Oaklawn Park had tried to tell him something about a race he had overlooked, or something like that.

One other thing he knew was that he was hungry. Was it Saturday morning? It was. He hadn't missed work. There was plenty of time to eat, sleep, and drive to the racetrack. There were shards of a broken lampshade all around the door to his kitchen. Rock knew he could take care of that matter in the daylight.

Sensation

Something Rock had imagined or designed or written had become an internet sensation. He couldn't remember what it was, though he had spent much of the night stewing over it with at least a handful of characters. He also couldn't remember who he sent it to, but whoever it was had apparently forwarded it to people in charge of some sort of commercial enterprise that was now eager to begin an advertising campaign.
Rock climbed out of bed with an intent to clean a bit. He knew people would soon begin to arrive.
He wondered why his phone had not yet rung and suddenly remembered he had calls to make. It was nearly nine a.m., and he needed to call people at Oaklawn Park for a story.
As Rock ate a PayDay bar, he heard a garbage truck approach his house and began to look for his shoes.

In the cards

Rock was pleased to see that Pam had put on some weight. He hadn't seen her for a while, but here she was in the large shed where Rock had stored all sorts of stuff twenty years earlier when he lived with Tall Bob in southern Levy.
Rock's cat Jo was there, too. She and Pam had never much gotten along in the nearly ten years they lived together. Nevertheless, Rock found them playing side-by-side on a pile of baseball cards leftover from his childhood.

A mannequin

She was a boyish short-haired blonde, strong and athletic, a bit overweight, but clearly fit. Her run for the Little Rock Hash House Harriers had just ended, and Rock watched as she pulled a life-sized mannequin from the back of her pickup. As she stood it up at the edge of the group, it became obvious to everyone, Rock included, that it was a nearly perfect replica of him.
"Shit, Rock, it's you," someone said.
For a brief moment, he was honored, but then the woman poured a cup of beer over the mannequin's head. She began to curse at it, and she then knocked it to the ground with a fist. The crowd was amused at first, but this had turned weird.

Auto blockers

Theirs was an effort to drive cars over a large, muddy pasture as if it were a football field and the cars offensive linemen. The idea was to keep the cars between imaginary pass rushers and quarterbacks. Rock had heard of it, but this was his first attempt at the game, and he was committed to following the lead of a husky, pleasant looking woman in the other car.
It was difficult in many ways, but foremost among the challenges for Rock was to keep his car in motion and not stuck in the huge, sloppy ruts that grew larger with each round. He was encouraged throughout by the woman. She seemed expert, as though this were nothing new for her.

Rock-and-roll dream

This woman was in the midst of an active rock-and-roll dream, and Rock watched from a balcony seat. She was fully aware that a dream was underway and consequently resisted at first, but later she let it consume her and tried as hard as she could to remain focused on a television program that had thus far served as her guide.
Rock was amazed to see this lovely middle-aged woman convince herself that she could play a guitar solo through the night. He knew she knew that her daughter depended on her success.

Trouble

Someone at a college gymnasium challenged Rock to a game of one-on-one volleyball. Rock accepted and promptly watched as his opponent rocketed a serve past him that he had no chance to return or so much as touch.
Impressed as he was, Rock could tell that the ball didn't look right. He picked it up to see that it was in fact much smaller than a volleyball. It was no larger than an orange, and it was wrapped in an odd canvas-like cover.
"We can't play with this," Rock said. "I'm going to go check out a real volleyball."
His opponent agreed, and they both began to sprint toward the equipment room on the opposite side of the building. En route, Rock made a right turn across a mat for gymnasts and tried to run between two girls dressed in tights. They failed to move, and Rock ran directly between them as they stood shoulder to shoulder. They both spun around from the contact and fell to the mat.
Almost immediately, Rock knew he was in trouble.
"Shit, man, you can't do that," his volleyball opponent said.
"I know," Rock said. "I don't know what I was thinking."