Types of meat

He did not know why, but Rock had agreed to buy three tubular, metal containers, each filled with at least a gallon of micro-brewed beer, and three stacks of sandwich meat, each several inches thick.
Rock was with fellow sportswriter Tim Cooper in an old grocery store that also sold hardware and outdoor supplies, similar to a classic southern general store. Apparently, the owner, an overweight man in a dirty white apron was responsible for Rock's purchases. He had shown him a choice of several types of meat, huge piles of each on sheets of wax paper, and some beer Rock knew he would not like but could not resist.
"Your the first person who ever turned down bacon," the grocer said.
"I can get bacon anywhere," Rock said.
As he walked with the meat and beer toward his car, Rock couldn't imagine why he had purchased this stuff. He wondered if Coop would take it.

Incredible worry

After a careful examination of the internet report of his utility bills on his laptop, Rock realized he had long paid water bills for at least two friends with the Little Rock Hash House Harriers. One was a seventy-five-year-old man named Bob McKinney, who lived in a four-hundred thousand dollar west Little Rock home and had multiple adult children and many grandchildren. The other was a former girlfriend named Jenny Devine, who now lived with her husband—an airline pilot for Delta—and two teenaged children in a New Jersey suburb of New York City.
This seemed incredible. Rock knew his own water bill had run twenty-five dollars a month for the last seventeen years, but he didn't think he could possibly have paid fifty dollars a month for the last twenty without knowing it.
He was awake now, sitting in 9 a.m. daylight on his living room couch. Rock walked into his bathroom and saw that his cat Joe had shredded toilet paper that hung toward the floor from the roller on the wall above. He figured this was somehow correlated to his having cut off another Hasher's electricity bill he had also paid for years.
Rock wondered why he wasn't broke, but his worry gradually dispersed as he began to more-clearly realize none of these things were possible.

Full-frontal nudity

Rock had watched television reruns most of his life, beginning with Sky King in 1962, followed by I Love Lucy, My Three Sons, Andy Griffith, with a middling period dominated by Coach, the Star Trek renewals, and, of course, Seinfeld, all the way to The King of Queens, but he had never seen this particular program, or even heard of it, which kind of shocked him.
In his den in Levy, right before him, was a Seinfeld episode with full-frontal nudity. Jerry and Elaine walked around in Jerry's apartment buck naked. The thing was, it was actually kind of funny, and also a bit gross, both characterizations augmented by each actor's new obesity.
This show aired thirty years earlier, and Rock couldn't imagine how he had never known about it.

Just like that

It came to Rock's attention that the talk-radio station he had worked for nearly thirty years earlier had shut down its programming. Just like that, overnight, the station had let all its employees go and begun to present a format of dead air.
Aging members of Rock's former audience—mostly sentimental old men—asked him to volunteer for a mid-morning shift and, just like that, he was behind a microphone at ten in the morning on a signal that covered more than half the state's population. He was totally unprepared, and already people called to ask his take on matters he knew nothing about.
During Rock's run as a radio host, he took hours to memorize names and statistics, like a serious science student on evenings and mornings before tests. On this day, he had no choice but to wing his answers. The difference in this circumstance was that everyone, including listeners, understood. He was consequently at ease.

The Cleveland Browns

Andy Reid, head coach for the NFL's Cleveland Browns, had not been able to find a placekicker willing to so much as kick an extra point for his team. He finally settled on a black and gray tabby housecat, but with a game on the line, the cat was curled up near the endzone in Rock's living room-den, next to a long white couch that had been knocked back into a dining area adjacent to the kitchen.
The cat would not wake up. Obviously, kicking a football was out of the question.
Rock soon realized this had gone on for most of the season, and in fact had begun to draw national attention. Television crews wanted in, so he decided to move the couch and coffee table back into place and restack a pile of books that were strewn across the den's large burgundy rug.

Coach Sieg

Athletes from UALR's track teams were spread across Verizon Arena in North Little Rock. Rock hadn't been in the facility since the winter and spring of 2009 when he covered the Arkansas Twisters' final season of arena football and had wandered in through the back bay door just to look around.
Rock's attention was drawn first by two young men as they sprinted above him, each on two translucent six-inch-wide strips of plastic, stretched six inches apart, fifteen feet above the floor of the facility.
Before he could find anyone to ask about this anomaly, he heard a familiar voice.
"Hey, Rock. How've you been?"
Rock turned to see a man he immediately recognized as the last of the Twisters' head coaches.
"Hey Coach, I'm fine," Rock said. "It's good to see you again, man."
Typical of this experience, common now in the twilight of Rock's long career as a sportswriter, here was another of the thousands of coaches or athletes from his experience whose names he could not remember, at least not immediately. He dug deep, and quickly, to remember this man's last name was perhaps Siegfried. Yes. He had called him Coach Sieg.
"Same here, Rock. Do you still write for the paper?"
"I do, Coach Sieg. How about you? What are you doing these days?"
"For the time being, not much," he said. "In fact, I'm looking for work. Do you know if the Twisters have an opening?"
"Coach. Didn't you know? The Twisters haven't played since your last season here, you know, whenever that was, ten years ago."