No clear stakes

This was as bizarre as any of the critical, early-morning games Rock had either participated in or witnessed. In this one, Rock watched as two versions of a cat named Joe argued over which had been more precise in their measurements of molecules intertwined in a bundle of wires under Rock's back-bedroom bed.
Atypical of these contests, there were no clear stakes beyond bragging rights. No valuable things—including lives—were at stake, at least as far as Rock could tell.

Progressive worry

An earthquake was scheduled to strike the western edge of Los Angeles at an unspecified time later in the day. Rock woke up that morning confident he was safe in the enormous house he had slept in at least fifteen miles from the coastline, but as the day passed by, a progressive worry began to creep through him.
He wondered if he would feel safer outside and wished he had a city map.

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.

The Dirt Mile

Rock was surprised to hear that streaming coverage of the Breeders' Cup World Championships was scheduled to begin in a few minutes. It wasn't quite 5 a.m., and as he debated whether or not to get up to watch the Dirt Mile, his cat Joe aggressively licked the back of his head.
The sound of heavy rainfall rung against his roof and metal awnings. Combined with Joe's behavior, it served to help Rock realize there was no way a horse race in southern California would start at three in the morning local time.

Football fatigue

It wasn't exactly unimaginable, but the design of the Super Bowl and its television coverage baffled Rock. The best he could understand, it had been put into place so the University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban could watch the game while college football was underway and without a requirement that he leave Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Someone had designed the television frequency in such a way that it was carried across the country on the equivalent of the electronically-generated yellow stripe that television had employed for the previous thirty years as the yard line teams needed to reach for a first down. As far as Rock could tell, it made the Super Bowl omnipresent within the broad confines of a football season. He tried to watch it in the middle of a game between Kansas State and Oklahoma, but he was far too sleepy to concentrate on both a mid-season college game and the Super Bowl at the same time.

Impossibilities

Entry into whatever was at the end of Rock's long, arduous pursuit required he do something he suspected and indeed determined was impossible. Though he was alone, it was almost as if there was a gatekeeper in place to give Rock the rules.
Rock clearly understood that to enter he would have to press the palm of his right hand flat on his right shoulder blade. His attempt was, of course, futile, and it was hard for him to fathom why anyone or anything would have established a mandate that was nothing less than an anatomical impossibility.
Within seconds, he wondered if this was set up to eliminate the need for any sort of heaven. In fact, Rock knew a conversation was already underway among theological scholars. He could literally hear it coming from the hallway outside of his front bedroom.

The cutest thing

Rock's kitten Joe weighed about a half a pound and had climbed into a baseball cap with a baby rabbit and a puppy, both of which were no heavier than two or three ounces. As Joe slept, the bunny and tiny dog nestled together in the fluff of his midsection.
"You need to take picture of that," Rock's friend Tim Cooper said.
"No kidding," Rock said. "That's gotta be the cutest thing anyone's ever seen."

Nonsensical choices

Something was wrong with the remote. No matter how many times Rock tried to switch from one streaming channel to another, all he could find were nonsensical choices, including one that offered him certain suffocation in either his den or kitchen or the empty and dark chill of his front yard. There was an incessant alarm blaring somewhere in his house that did little more than accentuate the unlimited, meaningless storage sites for unreachable streaming television shows.
Rock had seen things like this before, but he could not remember anything so bereft of hope. There was nothing to breathe, even outside, where earlier he felt the energetic, pastel-colored, good-willed life of a mid-October afternoon.
Maybe something to eat would help, Rock thought, though he was doubtful of a solution so simple.

Containment

The CBS network's weekday morning show hired a lesbian as one of its anchors, and several network affiliates across the south replaced the national show with local programming, including KTHV in Little Rock.
Rock was among many who seemed stunned by the reaction of these southern television stations. "I thought all those morning shows had at least one gay person on them," he said in a conversation with a longtime friend.
Protests of the station's homophobic choice spread over the Little Rock metro throughout the day. Rock joined it at a bus stop on McCain Boulevard in front of a North Little Rock Barnes & Noble bookstore. When he stepped out of an approximately twenty-square-foot area marked to contain the dissidents, several city police officers drew and pointed pistols, rifles, and one AK-47 directly at him.
The cops' response seemed perfectly appropriate, Rock thought. He was nevertheless somewhat panicked that he might soon die.

The descent

The police officer in the passenger seat seemed completely indifferent to Rock's Crown Vic rolling backward down Kavanaugh Boulevard from the Heights neighborhood in Little Rock. Rock was panicked, but he somehow managed to direct the mammoth car around Mount Saint Mary High School onto Van Buren Street toward War Memorial Park.
To begin, Rock had been parked on Kavanaugh in the Height's business district. He had just tossed an empty beer can onto the backseat floorboard when he heard the cop tap a knuckle on the passenger-side window. Very shortly thereafter, the officer was seated beside Rock, studying data of some sort on a smartphone when the Crown Vic's brakes failed.
As a result, Rock's car rolled backward, across Cantrell Boulevard and down and through an old, tree-ladened, fashionably quaint neighborhood of middle-class homes built by babyboomers seventy years earlier. The cop's inattention to this descent toward War Memorial Stadium and probable disaster baffled Rock, who had begun to wonder whether this was nothing but a dream.
Somehow, Rock managed to steer his car, still rolling in reverse, across Markham Street and around a sharp right turn between the stadium and the park's defunct golf course. Now on level ground, the car quickly decelerated and Rock was able to stop it against a chainlink fence stretched across the street.
The cop was gone. Indeed, Rock realized he had just awakened from a nightmare in which he was on the cusp of incarceration for driving while intoxicated. He knew it might take a while before he could drive his car again, so he pulled his golf clubs from the trunk and rolled them onto the closed golf course, where he began to look for the stretches of mowed grass scattered about.

Good friends

It had been at least ten years since Rock had seen his college buddy and TV news director Randy Dixon, but here he was seated next to him on a passenger train headed toward Camp Clearfork. There were lots of Hash House Harriers on board, too.
Rock tried to introduce Randy to Zach, the Little Rock Hasher in charge of the camp, but it soon became obvious that neither were interested in meeting characters from Rock's life about which they were completely uninformed.

Rock's embarrassment

Everyone on the tee box could see that Rock's drive stopped just short of a white flag in the fairway, approximately 150 yards from the center of the green. Rock knew this was an impossible result. He had not hit a drive beyond 240 yards in years, and this one went nearly 400.
Rock was paired with PGA Tour player Paul Casey, who acted as impressed as everyone else by the long, straight drive. That and everything else about this circumstance added to Rock's embarrassment when he shanked his five-iron approach.