High stakes

Rock wasn't sure who these people were or why they wanted him to tell them what he thought about the long run he took the night before, but it was critical he figure out a way to let them know. The coming daylight depended on it, perhaps even existence itself. The stakes had never been this high.
Fortunately for Rock, he found a tube of energy gel on his nightstand. He ate it and half crawled from his sleep to a bag of PayDay bars in the kitchen.

Legal issues

He couldn't remember how he did it, but Rock had arranged things so that his fantasy football team would receive credit for points scored by a player on his neighbor Tom Jenning's team. He knew this subterfuge gave him a significant financial advantage, but it suddenly occurred to him that what he had done involved theft and that perhaps there were legal issues to consider.

Rock wanted to win, sure, but he did not want to steal money from Tom or anyone else. Also, indeed primarily, he hoped he wouldn't be arrested, and for the moment at least, the matter left him somewhat panicked.

Perfect flaws

Someone had arranged in advance for Rock's stinky feet. As the huge Hash House Harrier party neared its conclusion, Rock found his white hightop Chuck Taylors near one of the massive columns on a concrete walkway that led to the capitol building's banquet hall. After he sat to put them on, a former Little Rock Hash matriarch named Barbara Sutherland picked up a slip of paper, apparently torn from one of Rock's reporter notepads and placed on the walkway beside his shoes. She glanced at it and laughed as she handed it to Rock.

Someone had written a reminder on it to have him change into a new pair of Chuck Taylors before he headed home.

"Change your shoes," said Barbara, as a crowd complicit in the humor of Rock's hygienic flaws gathered near them. "You gotta know how bad your feet stink, right?"

Everyone laughed, which served to make him feel adored.

Too Late

Rock agreed to write a story for the next day's paper; he knew that, but he couldn't remember what he was asked to write about. It was midnight, and he had just awakened unsure of much, but he thought he must have fallen asleep when it was still daylight. His TV was tuned to the channel on which he had watched a spring-training game, but he knew the game had ended before sunset—it was played in a park without lights—and now the screen was blank except for an MLB.TV logo.
He was supposed to write about the game. He knew that now, but it was too late.
It seemed odd that he didn't know what day it was. His watch said it was very early Tuesday morning, but that didn't seem right, even though his laptop confirmed it. He wondered where Monday had gone and why he would have possibly agreed to write about a spring training game that he watched on television.

Pine Bluff

It was sad to everyone. The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff Golden Lions football team had fallen on such hard times that it no longer played games on a regulation field. In fact, the Golden Lions were limited to eight-man football, a game designed for tiny high schools with student bodies too small to field eleven-man teams. Their games had been moved to the former site of Pumphrey Stadium, now a vacant lot of grass and weeds and a football field eighty yards long and forty yards wide.
Rock remembered playing peewee football as an eleven-year-old on a similar field in Huntsville, Alabama, nearly fifty years earlier. He shared that with Ronnie, Arkansas-Pine Bluff's sports information director, who could only shake his head.
"I don't know what to tell you," Ronnie said. "We can't even get the band to come to our games."

Short shot

Comedian and actor Martin Short was a member of the PGA Tour, and Rock was not at all surprised to see him in contention late in a tournament he was assigned to cover for the paper.
On the final hole, Short's approach landed in a greenside bunker and was pinned in behind a standard, dark green, U-channel signpost. He had no shot at the pin but hoped he could get his ball out of the sand to the front of the green. Unfortunately for Short, the signpost limited his backswing to mere inches, and he managed to move his ball no more than a foot from where it landed, and it remained in the trap.
Afterward, he and Rock both tried the shot again. Neither could improve on Short's first effort.
"That's just a hard shot," Short said. "I figured it was beyond me when I first saw it."
"No kidding," Rock said. "There really isn't much you can do with that."

Potential ruin

Some sort of minor deity had taken control of Rock's house and, among other odd acts of subversion, had robbed it of its internet connection. This mysterious being, perhaps no more than a misinformed utility technician, also set things up so that Rock couldn't find a way to check his laptop or telephone. Furthermore, his television didn't work.
There was a saucepan of canned blackeyed peas on Rock's stovetop, and he considered eating a bowl. Rock hoped that perhaps that alone would reverse this potential tragedy. He also wondered if a failure to eat the peas in the first place had led to all this. For several minutes, Rock feared his life was ruined.

In print

The worldwide reaction to President Rock's written statements surprised and confused everyone, from those involved in their delivery to the leaders and their followers who felt or appeared most threatened by them. It seemed the president could say whatever he liked without particular or significant repercussions, but once the words appeared in print, all hell would break loose.
This odd difference had become the talk of the world, and no one could explain it.

Perfect timing

This process had turned tiresome for Rock. Each night, he had to park his car as close as possible to Tucker Coliseum in Russellville, Arkansas, so that audio equipment mounted in its trunk could record a few of the songs played by whatever musician or musicians were there.
On this particular night, he timed everything perfectly and was able to capture each note of the song Africa, played by original members of the 1980s band Toto. A bearded audio engineer on site was clearly delighted. "You can go on home, Rock," he said. "We got it. That was great."
Though Rock recognized the accomplishment as a gem in his otherwise tedious routine, he wished he could do something else with his evenings.

A bad break

Something was wrong with his brakes. Rock had just backed his car out of an apartment complex parking space, but when he stepped on the brake pedal, it offered no resistance and depressed to the floorboard. As his car rolled backward, downhill toward a row of parked cars, Rocked pumped the pedal as rapidly as he could. He began to feel pressure build and his car had begun to slow, but it seemed there was no way it could possibly stop before it struck one of the parked cars. Nevertheless, he continued to pump the brake until his car stopped inches from the trunk of a black sedan.

Faster

It had been years since Rock last ran this way. He was clearly fastest among the many runners on the trail loop that wound through woods for a mile so near the Pinnacle Mountain Visitors Center.
Running had never felt easier. He wondered if the golf iron in his left hand helped explain this new and unexpected level of fitness.

The timeline

A woman had been sent back in time to assist Rock in his effort to clean his house, but something about the time-travel process had caused her to lose her glasses. They were missing when she appeared in his back bedroom, and there was no way for her to work without them.
Rock knew they were somewhere along the timeline, but the complexity of this puzzle was beyond his intellectual ability to decipher. He soon gave up and returned to bed.

Light beer

Rock's old friend Marion drove them toward a minimart in Sarasota, Fla. Rock was there for a visit and rode in the front passenger seat. Marion's twenty-five-year-old son Grady sat in the back.
They walked into the minimart and headed directly for the beer cooler. As Rock studied the vast selection of thirty-packs, Marion walked up with a large cardboard box that he placed beside a single-door cooler packed with forty-ounce bottles. He began to fill the box, and within a minute, he and Grady had packed away at least twenty bottles of Budweiser and Miller High Life.
"Man, could we get at least a couple of bottles of light?" Rock said.
Marion and Grady both laughed and began with a stereotypical condemnation of light beer and light-beer drinkers common among their ilk since the introduction of Miller Lite forty years back.
"I forgot to tell you that Rock's a big pussy," Marion said.
Rock had been exposed to the routine so long that he was immune to it.
"Fuck you guys," he said. "Just get some goddamn light."

A crowded diner

It was among Rock's favorite kind of places, a crowded old southern American diner full of banter and the smell of fried food. He sat at a booth table with three of his minor league baseball teammates, one of whom had become a concern. They had all drunk several longneck bottles of Budweiser as they waited for their orders, but a scrawny seventy-year-old African American player Rock barely knew was apparently drunk before they walked in and seemed angered by something.

Rock watched as the older player stood, by then clearly enraged, and threw a beer bottle across the restaurant. The bottle ricocheted off a window frame and into a bucket of beer and ice at the table of several large African American men. One of them reached for Rock, grabbed him by an arm and pulled him up from the table.

"I'm gonna kick your ass," he said.

Rock had no doubt he intended to.

Supplements

Rock finished far back in the Olympic marathon, but just enough attention was given to him that he later worried someone would criticize his nutritional claims. Before the race even started, he told anyone who would listen about the supplements he had taken, several in some way connected to something derived from oysters. He specifically wondered whether or not he would have to explain to his primary care physician Bill Joseph why he had given any credit whatsoever to bottles of pills.