The final hole

Rock couldn't miss. Every single putt he attempted had rolled in throughout his round. He was on the final hole, and his approach shot stopped on the fringe, ten feet from the pin.
This would be Rock's first chip shot of the day. Chips had become a strength of his game, but he bladed this one, and it motored toward the hole, seemingly destined to roll all the way across the green and into his own backyard.
But he couldn't miss. Rock's shot slammed into the pin and dropped to the bottom of the cup, just as he should have expected on a day like this.

The flood

Rain had fallen all night the night before, but there was more involved in this late afternoon flood in Levy. Water, thick with what looked like sludgy, black oil, was already at least two feet deep on Orange Street. It flowed north to south and ran through yards and up the exterior walls of all of the houses, including Rock's. It had reached his front porch and was getting deeper. It made no sense to him. He couldn't imagine the source of this water, but Rock feared he might drown.

A perfect place

Rock knew he was in a nearly perfect place. Everything about his life was set by circumstances he had put into place years earlier when he was capable of such arrangements. There was still enough mystery to maintain his interest, but he was confident all would turn well as long as he lived.
It was cool in his house. Hogan's Heroes was on TV. Rock was hungry and a bit lonely, but his cat Joe was nearby, and he couldn't think of anything he wanted.

Silliness

A test had been arranged by someone to see how Rock and his cat Joe would react to separate 6 a.m. wake-up times, the first of which was work-related and the other established for no obvious reason on a typical Sunday morning free of obligation.
Both were up at 6 a.m. sharp for the former. For the latter, Rock climbed out of bed with Joe at 6:02. He let the cat out through the back door, ate a bowl of Bran Buds and a handful of walnuts, and wondered what this silliness was all about.

In deep

No one had ever seen so much rain at a 100-mile trail race. Runners had been on the course for most of a day, and it fell throughout.
Rock was with Bob Marston near the finish line on a paved county road. It was late at night and dark in this secluded section of a national forest. Water flowed across the road and was avoidable only through careful navigation that Bob seemed incapable of. Rock laughed to see him up to his waist in water in the front yard of a country house near a crowd of volunteers gathered at the finish.

Dangerous places

This recurring dream had become so complex that Rock could walk from his bed, wide awake from everything except the dream-like grip of hypoglycemia, convinced that his house was the epicenter of earth's dwindling energy resources and the corresponding spill-over filth of carbon-based fuel consumption. He knew he could never leave. There were too many people outside, and his reputation throughout not only his immediate neighborhood but across much of the world had dropped into dangerous places.
As always before, Rock thought his sole hope was to clean and straighten his living-room den, the only room most of his visitors ever entered. A lack of balance worked against him, but he wasn't sure anything mattered anymore.

The ambulance

Apparently one of Rock's neighbors in Levy called an ambulance for him. He surmised this for the benefit of his doctor, who was as confused as Rock when he was delivered an hour before sunrise to the doctor's office in southwest Little Rock.
"You are a little hypoglycemic, but this seems well within your tolerance level," the doctor said. "This doesn't make any fucking sense."
"I told the guys in the ambulance that I was fine, but they insisted on bringing me all the way over here," Rock said. "I don't understand it either."

Chicken rows

Rock and several of his neighbors had long debated the significance of chicken in the American diet, and Rock weighed heavily in chicken's favor. His cat Joe took a contrarian stance, but Rock thought he had all the evidence he needed when he awoke to find yellow styrofoam packages of four chicken thighs each stretched in a row from his back bedroom to the kitchen.
Joe seemed convinced, but he was also anxious to go outside. As Rock walked toward the front door, he wondered where all the chicken had gone.

Racecats

Several racehorses the size, shape, and color of Rock's cat Joe were in Rock's back bedroom at daybreak. Rock interviewed their jockeys one by one and heard the same from each, bearing in mind as always that optimism from horserace participants skews their comments to an extent that renders them virtually meaningless.
"We feel good about our chances," they said; the only variable was how their rides responded to whatever medications they were prescribed.
It gradually dawned on Rock that these animals weren't horses at all. They were, in fact, housecats, which raised an infinite set of questions. At first, Rock wondered how racing had conned the public for so long and what sort of visual tomfoolery was required to make ten-pound cats appear as one-thousand-pound horses. How did they carry their jockeys? Why were they not visually dwarfed by the enormity of one-mile racetracks? It seemed as if they would do nothing more than sink into the sand and silt.
After a while, Rock saw other horses around the track, regular thoroughbreds familiar to nearly everyone. He guessed the cats were used for cheaper races, but this was all very confusing. He wanted to call his horse-training friend Lynn Chleborad. She usually had the dirt on everything, but he wasn't sure how to begin this potential story of a lifetime, this incredible, perhaps world-changing story about cats. Rock was indeed frightened by it.

Fantasy football

A running back for Rock's fantasy football team scored a touchdown even though a lineman for the running back's team had illegally blocked an opposing player. Had a penalty been called, the touchdown would not have counted and Rock's team would not have received six points.
Rock knew he was responsible for the missed call. Apparently, the owner of the fantasy team Rock's team was playing also knew this. That must've been why Rock's flip phone kept ringing on his nightstand long before daybreak.

Balloons

Two hot-air balloons were attached to the hull of a caravel-type ship, typical of those used by seafaring explorers of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, and Rock and dozens of others boarded the craft in a vast city park late in the evening of some sort of summertime celebration.

All went well as they skimmed past trees on the edge of the park, no more than ten to fifteen feet above the crowd and carnival grounds, but Rock gradually began to feel something go amiss. The ship at first brushed the trees and then began to drift randomly across the park, an apparent loss of control adequate to somewhat panic him. 

A Skillet

There was a Beat the Streak option called a Skillet. This was a way out for internet players who had not selected anyone in the mlb.com fantasy game the night before and had subsequently failed to fall asleep.
"I think they named it that because it sounds like the name of that guy from Chicago who faked a hate crime against himself," Rock explained to no one in particular.
Rock tried to pick someone, but nothing seemed to work with his computer. As he tried to figure out the malfunction, he could hear an alarm go off in his back bedroom. Apparently, he had nodded off in his living room recliner.

The concession stand

After climbing down from the press box on a maze of unsecured aluminum ladders, Rock approached a concession stand a hundred or more feet below the stadium's upper reaches. It was unlike any he had theretofore seen, with only two items listed on a chalkboard menu.
This concession stand served steaks and frog legs and nothing else. From Rock's perspective, the steaks looked perfect. They were each huge three-inch thick Porterhouses. There were a dozen or more of them spread on platters behind the clerk who approached Rock. Each of the slabs were textbook medium rare, and Rock figured they weighed at least three pounds each.
The steaks looked wonderful, but Rock wasn't particularly hungry, and he couldn't imagine how much a three-pound steak would cost at typical concession-stand rates, so he went with the frog legs. They were indeed cheap, but whereas the steaks were perfect, the frog legs had the bland, tasteless appearance of processed fried food. Rock wished he had dug deep.

Impossible old house

Years had passed since Rock was last in this enormous old house, but as before, he had moved in at the invitation of extended family members. He was given the familiar back portion, which alone was twice the size of his former house in Levy. Rock remembered living in this very section several times over the last thirty years.
On his first day there, one of his many Hispanic first cousins—an overweight but pretty thirty-year-old woman—approached him in his kitchen with a photo album. His cousin and Rock overlooked a vast, dark-paneled den filled with at least a dozen other relatives. She tucked her left arm under Rock's right, leaned into him, and held the album so they could both see it. "Take a lot at these hot chicks, Rock," she said. "You need to meet them. They're really hot, and I promise, they would all love you."
He knew this was too good. It was impossible.