Through the wire

An overweight young woman, perhaps in her mid-thirties, had been transported into Rock's back bedroom through the wire that connected to an electric blanket on the room's small bed. This made no sense to Rock, but apparently whatever the woman did had drawn worldwide attention. No one had ever seen anything like it.

Literary scholars

A collection of older Little Rock Hash House Harriers, led by Reverend Bob and a handful of stereotypical literary scholars—overweight, balding, gray-haired men with beards—were at Rock's door in Levy to tell him they had examined his writings and said it was clear his work was superior to all of the others they found in his house.
At first, Rock was pleased. There were greats works of contemporary literature in each of his bookcases, several hundred at least, and he thought they were included in the count.
Rock later learned from Bob his work had only been compared to those of his cat Jo's.
"You're telling me these experts have concluded that I can outwrite my housecat," Rock said. "That's great to know, Bob. Thanks."

The past

It was believable because it was true: Rock had traveled approximately thirteen billion, eight-hundred million years into the past, to the instant of the Big Bang, to learn the universe had been created without the constituents of hydrogen, oxygen, or carbon. It was clear to him that nothing recognizable had or would ever exist.

His house and all within it looked the same, including Jo the cat, but Rock knew none of what appeared before him could possibly be there.

Weight loss

They had been together for much of a large outdoor social gathering before Rock noticed that Walt had lost hundreds of pounds. He was truly lean.
"Goddamn, Walt, what do you weigh?" Rock said.
"I'm at about a hundred seventy."
"You're kidding. Jimminy Cricket, man. Hell, I outweigh you by twenty pounds. How did you finally do this?"
"What do you mean? I just watched what I ate."
Walt had been among Rock's close friends for a little over twenty-eight years, and during each of those years, he had routinely gone on and on about his need to lose weight, and now, out of the blue, relatively overnight, he had lost at least three hundred pounds, perhaps more. Rock was confused and couldn't seem to get an answer from Walt.

Totino's frozen pizzas

There was virtually no difference between the winning entrant in the pizza cookoff held in Rock's house and the masterpieces Rock had long created on the foundation of Totino's frozen pizzas. Even the winner, a bearded young man of middle-eastern decent from New York City, acknowledged the validity of this culinary oddity.

Both Rock and the winner thought the strangest thing was how much Jo the cat liked pizza. She had apparently walked into the front yard at daybreak with a short stack of contest entries.

Backyard disaster

There were at least half a dozen tiny sprinkler heads from which water gushed and pooled in Rock's backyard. The pools had begun to overflow into his neighbor Merle's backyard. It was clear to Rock that a disaster loomed.
Staten, a photographer from the paper, and Pulaski Academy head football coach Jon Kelley coincidentally stopped by moments after Rock discovered the flood.
"I don't know what's going on," Rock said. "I didn't even know this yard had a sprinkler system."

Otherworldliness

This room, these rooms, rung of otherworldliness, though in many ways the place had begun to remind Rock of his house in Levy. A frightened and curious, gray and white cat looked at him from the rim of a bathtub. She looked familiar, but he was too lost in a maze of words from the dim light of a back bedroom to consider her.

Hall of Fame

Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs second-year quarterback, had been inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, and Hall officials decided they wanted to try something different. They came up with a plan involving Rock's house that seemed clever on the surface, but after careful examination from Rock's perspective, it seemed so farfetched that he decided not to participate.
The officials told Rock they wanted to transport his house, with Mahomes inside, directly to the Hall of Fame building in Indianapolis. In order to do this, they told Rock he would need to empty his house of everything and clean it so that it looked as it did the day he moved in.

Saddle-cloth numbers

The new betting system for racing at Oaklawn Park confused Rock to the point he questioned its viability. Obviously, he thought, it had been designed for no other reason than to allow it to merge aesthetically with the color and flash of Oaklawn's casino. For instance, betters would select the horse they wanted to bet by pressing large, translucent plastic buttons that flashed the colors of saddle-cloth numbers designated to identify the post position of horses entered in a particular race, e.g., betters should know to press the red button to select the No. 1 horse, white to select the No. 2, blue the No. 3, yellow the No. 4, and so forth through the lime green No. 12.
For one thing, the system would require gamblers to memorize each of the twelve colors of the corresponding saddle-cloth numbers. Rock figured no more than one in a hundred racing fans had ever done that. In fact, few of his fellow turf writers had, either.

Jo's tags

Hours before kickoff, Rock decided to take a nap near one of the teams' benches. A few players stretched nearby as Rock lie down in the stadium's pregame dim. It was nearly silent inside, so Rock heard the bell on Jo's tags ring before she walked lightly across his legs to curl up next to his knees.

Hardy Jo

Rain fell in figurative buckets. It was cold out. One of the cats—Jo, the younger of the two—ran directly in from the porch when Rock opened the front door. He wondered if Pam was inside, perhaps hidden under one of the beds. She was older and much frailer than hardy Jo. Rock wasn't sure when he had last seen her, and he was worried beyond reason.

Exhibition baseball

Not long after Tommy Lasorda made Rock hand over a six-pack of Miller High Life bottles, because, as the Hall of Fame Dodgers manager said, "You can't bring that shit in here if it ain't Budweiser," Rock was at a UALR exhibition baseball game just off Dickson Street in Fayetteville, close to the University of Arkansas campus.
Rock walked from the game through an old, dimly-lited dank tunnel with a young brunette to the red brick of the city's downtown square as he spoke on his cell phone with UALR athletic director Rick Mello. He reflected on a huge haystack-like pile of bleached cornmeal someone had dumped just off the field. A student manager told Rock it was used to mark home plate and the baselines, but Rock and everyone else recognized it as nothing more than a mess. It had been far too close to first base, and several players ran into it, which caused a white cloud of the meal to spread across players and nearby spectators. Almost everyone there was at least a bit stained by the powdery white dust.
"That's a legitimate criticism," Mello said. "We're going to have to do something about that."