A pleasant simplification

The recently established age of information technology had turned obsolete overnight. All inaccessible things on earth were now meaningless to anyone other than those who possessed them. Passwords were irrelevant, which had become obvious to Rock as he walked across and around actual and metaphorical borders with ease.
There was one at the end of an old pillow on Rock's front bedroom bed, inches from his face, but he was confident he could ignore it. His house seemed filled with gatekeepers, each baffled by a cat named Joe's and his indifference to them and everything else.
At first, this change struck Rock as a pleasant simplification, but he didn't know what he had done the night before. His watch told him it was early Saturday morning, and he wondered if he had agreed to cover a game for the paper that afternoon or evening. He wasn't sure what he was to do this day or where to go to find out.

Green Acres

Young and energetic, enthusiastic high school football coaching staffs bent toward masculine virility were common to Rock's experience. They had changed little in his life among them, long before he had begun to record their efforts for papers and such, from when he was among their subjects, but this group at Joe T. Robinson High School took the cake.
Rock drove through a quarter-mile of woods to a clubhouse they had built behind the school. It included a large kitchen, with grills with and smokers spread about and an enormous cooler filled with ice and cans of cheap beer. There was a long communal table loaded with enormous platters of sandwiches and charred meat. The mandatory television—tuned to MeTV—was mounted to a wall, close to several coaches lounged in lawn chairs next to a large box filled with dozens of guns.
Rock was handed a tiny semiautomatic pistol, small enough to fit in a front pocket of his baggy short pants. "You might need this," the coach who had drawn the gun from the box said.
Before Rock asked why a pistol could become necessary, he heard the opening-credit soundtrack to the 1960s sitcom Green Acres. Ava Gabor had just sung, "I get allergic smelling hay,..." and Rock spontaneously reminisced.
"As a second-grader, when this show first came out, that lyric confused me," he said. "To me, it sounded like she was complaining that someone had given her some allergic-smelling hay. You know, as if she were around a bunch of hay that reeked of allergens."
The subsequent raucous laughter from these men surprised Rock.

A maze

There were patterns on the rugs in Rock's back bedroom and hallway that indicated where water could be found. They apparently were there to help the handful of people who had come to attempt to solve a puzzle or follow a maze of some sort.
Rock did his best to assist them, but he wasn't sure what he could do for these people or exactly why they were in his house.