A clear need for balance

The first tribute near the end of the movie was for the Union troops. There wasn't much to it, and it was immediately followed by a prolonged onslaught of soldiers dressed in gray. Someone sang Dixie as they marched from Rock's back bedroom bed and through a mangle of furniture and books and old clothes.
Rock thought there was a clear need for balance, but he wasn't sure where to look for it. People would complain. He knew that, and that he needed to go the bathroom, and that his foot still hurt.

Poker

The poker game had dwindled to four players, including Rock, a sports information director Rock had known for nearly thirty years, and some youngster whose juvenile behavior had everyone on edge.
The four agreed to play one more hand. Rock dealt each player five cards and was pleased to see he held two aces. That should be good enough, he thought.
But the young, cocky player had two threes and a joker. "Joker's wild, so that's three threes," he said.
"Bullshit," Rock said. "No one declared jokers were wild."
"I thought that was assumed," the kid said.

Coach Pat

There was a long way to go, but Arkansas-Little Rock's womens basketball team was off to a fantastic start against the top-ranked Tennessee Volunteers. Rock watched from reserve seats in Knoxville, where he sat next to Tennessee coach Pat Summit.
With ten minutes gone in the first half, Arkansas-Little Rock led by twenty points, and despite his proximity to Summit, Rock was rooting loudly.
Someone nearby turned to Summit and apologized for Rock's noisy celebration, but she shook her head and smiled. "He's behaving exactly as I would expect," Summit said. "He's doing what good fans do."

Rock was sold

Someone offered Rock free use of a downtown apartment. He had to ride in an elevator from the dimly-lighted, dank basement hallway of an office building near the Arkansas River to see it. A heavyset, African-American elevator operator told him this was the only way in or out.
The elevator opened into the living room-den of a large, beautifully furnished, high-rise apartment that overlooked the river and downtown North Little Rock. Rock was sold.

Chair to chair

The large group of volunteers that Rock had worked around for years at Arkansas-Little Rock Trojans basketball games had spent weeks devising a game they could play while the Trojans's game were underway.
It involved their moving from chair to chair around the perimeter of the court in a sort of race. Rock recommended to them that they keep score. He suggested they simply grant one point for each lap completed. They all agreed that the game should be limited to Arkansas-Little Rock home games.

He needed something to eat

At first Rock thought he had a choice. Of what it wasn't clear, but one of his options was to travel one-thousand years into the future. At least he thought it was an option. Before he had time to decide, he was in 3016.
He was pleased to find his house had survived, but it seemed nearly unbelievable that his television still worked. Howie Mandel was babbling on it about a group of teenage siblings having the goods to make it big or something. Rock had trouble standing. He knew he needed something to eat, but someone had pushed his couch back so far that it cut him off from the kitchen.

A bit of grandeur

Rock's father Richard accompanied him to his cousin Jill's funeral. They arrived a few minutes late and were consequently last in a line that extended far into the mezzanine of the large arena. At least hundreds of people were there, perhaps a thousand or more.
Rock knew how Richard's mind worked and had no doubt he relished their position. Entering the arena last, just before the service began, had the potential to add a bit of grandeur to his appearance. As for Rock, he hoped against hope more people would arrive.
Almost at the moment that thought formed, he saw a group of ten or more men walk into the lobby and toward them in line. They were in their twenties and thirties, each dressed in ill-fitting, ragtag suits, and even more wonderfully from Rock's perspective, each of them were carrying large cans or bottles of mini-mart beer, Miller and Budweiser and the like. To his delight, Rock knew immediately that a great story had brewed.

This so-called Dixie option

This was the first time Rock had been in the basement library of the Arkansas Gazette building in nearly twenty years, but it was perfectly unchanged. It remained dark, dank, and cool, with the same musty smell of old damp paper he remembered. He was there to find a story he had written about an Arkansas-Pine Bluff football game in the fall of 1990.
Within minutes, with story in hand, Rock was back in his blue bedroom, which had much the same feel as the basement library. Cool wind blew in from his rain-drenched backyard, and his cat Jo watched on quizzically as Rock spoke with a seventy-year-old African American copy editor named Wade, a cohort of his at the Gazette all those many years ago.
Wade explained how the Gazette had maintained what he called a "Dixie Option" on all of its copy from the Civil Rights era forward. He demonstrated: "We never used it, but it went like this," he said. Wade then punched up two copies of Rock's story. The first was as Rock had written it, but the second was changed so that its subjects appeared Caucasian, so that Arkansas-Pine Bluff no longer appeared as the historically black college it was.
Rock was fearful for several minutes, even after he had proceeded to his kitchen to turn down a fan, that this so-called Dixie option would be exposed, and with his name on the copy. He thought surely men at the presses must have seen the result of Wade's expose. He knew that in today's age of hypersensitivity, even to misdeeds from long ago, this could turn disastrous.

Without a word of warning

It seemed as though no one else noticed the policeman walk in, but Rock, from his desk in the newsroom, watched as he entered through the front door. He was short and stocky, with dark hair and a bushy mustache, and dressed in a standard navy-blue cop outfit.
The cop walked to Rock's desk, drew his pistol and looked over the side of an adjacent cubical. He took aim at someone or something Rock couldn't see, hesitated for a second, and without a word or warning fired two shots. He then held the gun at his side as he whispered something into a radio. Rock was frightened, but he noticed that the woman seated beside him had continued a phone interview throughout the incident without so much as a glance away from her desk, and it seemed as if her take was typical of everyone else's in the office.

A funny question

Rock met her at the Hash. She was tall, blonde, breathtakingly cute, perhaps thirty years old, and asked if he would let her take him to the restaurant several Hashers had selected for their post-run gathering, which seemed like a funny question to him. He laughed as he told her that he would indeed let her, though he understood grief from his Hashing friends was on the way.
She was curious about the tabloid Rock held.
"It's a racing form," he explained. "I'm going to the horse races this afternoon."
"Are you kidding me? Is there a racetrack around here?" she said. Rock thought she sounded genuinely astonished, and delighted. "I absolutely love horses."

A long advertisement

Rock's new world was nothing more than a long advertisement for his MacBook Pro. He awoke late at night and was influenced enough by it that he walked into his living room and opened his computer. All it showed him were video after video of enormous indoor spaces in various shopping malls, airports, and hotel lobbies, as if they would demonstrate his laptop's power and clarity.
The rooms were empty of people, but he found that he could call up individuals to see how they fit in. The first man walked around aimlessly for a minute or two before he stopped to complain. "You know what, this is really boring," he said. "Could you take me out of this?"
Finally Rock was able to call up his own house, and was very grateful to find he could eat out of the refrigerator. He wondered if he could simply drop into the video and eat free food for life.

A long pedestrian bridge

Rock's legs felt as lively as ever, but he was a little bit lost. He thought a left turn would get him back to I-30 and that from there he could return downtown along familiar access roads, but within minutes he was in sight of the interstate and could see there was too much traffic for anyone on foot, so he made a u-turn and found himself at the base of a long pedestrian bridge.
As he made his way above the traffic, he noticed a large young woman dressed in a knee-length mustard yellow skirt and matching sleeveless blouse. When he tried to run past her, she grabbed his left arm with such force that he had no choice but to stop. He noticed her face was coated with heavy rouge and mascara.
"Are you ready for some fun?" she said.
He felt a surge of panic. The woman was overwhelmingly large and powerful, and there was no apparent escape route from this narrow, dimly-lighted underground tunnel.

The Packers-Bears game

It was a little past 8 a.m. and Rock was still in bed. He could hear a crowd in his living room and knew they had come to watch the Packers-Bears game.
He got up and walked down to his basement where dozens of people, mostly Little Rock Hashers, stood in front of television mounted to a wall above them. Early in the first quarter, the Bears led, 7-3.

Insurance

There was no way Rock could leave his house before he paid for a relatively expensive insurance policy on his cats. It would cover the cost of any damage cats Pam or Jo might cause as they wandered around North Little Rock or through the neighboring woods of Pulaski County, and if he remembered correctly, it was going to set him back several hundred dollars. Rock needed to go to Hot Springs but couldn't until he sent in a check, and his problem, far beyond the cost, was that he couldn't find the bill.