Rock's host

 Rock awoke to the sound of police sirens. He could hear them from all over Little Rock. As he walked up a spiral staircase from a basement guest room, he passed his host, a pretty brunette he knew from runs with the Little Rock Hash House Harriers. Rock handed her a lampshade he had apparently dislodged the night before. She laughed with a measured hint of condescension, understandable when he reached her vestibule to find a dog in its attempt to grind marijuana from Rock's tiny backpack into tightly-woven carpet. Rock began to sweep it with his hand into the pack. As he did, he looked up to see two police cars pull into the driveway. He turned back to apologize to his host, but she was out of sight.

The fire

 A drum of hooves drew Rock's attention to the racetrack, and he looked up to see countless horses stream from a huge split-level barn behind Oaklawn's backstretch. Flames and smoke rose from the barn, and Rock knew horsemen would do all they could to save horses from the fire. Within minutes, each of the barn's fifteen-hundred thoroughbreds circled the track in a wall-to-wall oval ring. Rock knew he had a story to write.

An embarrassment

 There were characters in Rock's house he recognized from several Star Trek television series, including Reginald Barkley, an oddball from a handful of episodes of The Next Generation and Voyager. Someone told Rock this would be a long-term arrangement, set up for no more than a test of its durability. It all seemed unbelievable, and Rock wondered how long he could avoid the embarrassment of a house filled with adults dressed in uniforms from the United Federation of Planets. This might be enough to make his property a Levy laughingstock.

A shout for help

 Until the boy slid in mud to the bottom of a deep ditch near the fieldhouse, everything had gone well for Rock as he began work on a preseason story about Oak Grove High's football team. Oak Grove's coaches were glad to see him, and most of the players remembered him from the season before. One of those players was a typical overweight lineman, an African American underclassman who stumbled near the top of the fifteen-foot ditch into boulders, slick grime, and the two or three feet of water at its base. He lay motionless. "Do you think he's okay?" a coach said. "No, I don't believe so," Rock said as he began his slide toward the player. The boy appeared unconscious, perhaps dead, when Rock reached him. Rock lifted the boy's head from the water and shouted for help.

The Downtown Y

 The Downtown Little Rock YMCA closed in 1994, and Rock was surprised to see how much its interior had dilapidated. One of the basketball courts was dank, dingy, and strewn with cobwebs. Water dripped from the dark ceiling, just above the old wooden one-hundred and sixty-yard track that circled the court's perimeter, twenty feet above. Rock was last in this building a year before it was shuttered, there to interview a high school basketball player with a transplanted heart, and now he couldn't remember how to exit. He took the closest door he saw from the court and walked into a sparkling new room with a skylight above its fantastically complex weight machine. As he entered, he noticed a twin bed, dresser, and desk several steps above the weights. Just as it registered he might be in someone's private room, a college-aged man walked in. "Is this your room?" Rock said. The youngster looked frightened, and he stepped back out to the street and pulled the door shut behind him. Rock hoped the police wouldn't come.

A new game

A gaming consortium of several highly intelligent men had enlisted Rock and his cat Joe to participate in something akin to fantasy football, though they told Rock this new game was far more complex. Before he committed, he realized the group wanted Joe, not him, and it soon became clear that Joe and another recent recruit had specific areas of genius adequate to insure victory no matter the opponent. Rock was  confused but pleased to learn of his cat's rare, perhaps unique, ability. Joe seemed indifferent.

A financial nightmare

Rock bet a few long-shot horses at Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort. He missed their races but later saw he had won literally hundreds of millions of dollars, so much that he was baffled by what to do. Oaklawn's mutual department deposited the money into his checking account, and Rock knew enough about finances and routine security measures to guess there might be a safer place for his new fortune. He was suddenly filthy rich, but the complexity of it all, and potential tax implications, panicked him in oddly nightmarish ways.

Penniless

Apparently Rock had done some online banking and changed several of his investment strategies while he was asleep, and he awoke at about five a.m. to realize his net worth was significantly diminished. He found his laptop on an ottoman in the den but couldn't remember any of the websites he needed or even which browser he used. The urgency of all this was clear to him. Not only was the quality of his retirement in jeopardy, but he faced the possibility of pennilessness before daybreak.

Facebook Joe

Well before daybreak, shortly after he awoke to his alarm clock, it occurred to Rock that no one had taken a photograph of his cat Joe and him. Someone had posted such pictures on Facebook for the last several days to exhibit Joe's sound sleep, a trait contrary to his heretofore rambunctious early-morning behavior.
As Rock reached the hall, he was suddenly panicked. There were pictures on Facebook of him getting up in the morning, complete with his wild hair and underpants? He headed straight for his laptop, but to his great relief, knew better before he could turn it on.

House work

One of the contractors Rock hired to work on his house had subcontracted Rock's cat Pam to work three to four hours a night for $13 an hour. That sounded like an awful lot to pay a housecat, particularly Pam. As far as Rock could tell, she was currently on the clock and sound asleep on his front bedroom bed.

Oblivion

It was an unimaginably difficult golf hole. Steeply downhill from tee box to green, the fairway was made of a slick countertop-like material, perhaps granite or an artificial equivalent. The hole looked about three-hundred yards long, so Rock figured it was Par 4.
His first tee shot had rolled the length of the hole and sped into oblivion over the small hard green. Joe Ralston, an assistant pro at the course, laughed along with a course maintenance worker at the expected result and watched as Rock tried to walk back to the tee box.
Nearly halfway up the fairway, Rock realized it was far too steep to climb. In fact, balance had become an issue. He was at least a hundred yards above a rocky base and did not know what to do to avoid a potentially deadly fall. 

A truckstop in Clarksville

Rock was seated next to John Madden, the Professional Football Hall of Fame coach who now coached Rock's high school football team. They were at a truckstop in Clarksville, Arkansas, once a fried chicken paradise Rock thought had been closed for at least twenty years.
There was no doubt what he would order, but Rock recommended the ribeye steak for Coach Madden.
"It comes with this sauce made out of horseradish, mayonnaise, and buttermilk, which is out of this world," Rock said.
Madden seemed unconvinced.

The Great Donna

The Great Donna Falkenhain had been kidnapped, but Rock learned she would be released in exchange for former Russian President Boris Yeltsin somewhere in Levy later that Sunday morning. He found out she told someone she would wait for her husband at Rock's house.
It was not yet dusk, but it was near enough to daylight for Rock to search for more news. Before it occurred to him that this consternation was no more than a byproduct of dreamful sleep, he took a minute to sweep the floor in his den.

Soccer

Rock had never faced a newspaper challenge like this. It was just past dusk on Saturday when he remembered he had agreed to fill a page in the Sunday paper with an in-depth summary of the state high school soccer season. Four stories were due by early evening on a sport Rock had never followed.
He could not name a high school soccer player or coach, yet he would have to write stories on the best of each, boys and girls, and also compile all-state teams. Provided he could reach at least a handful of authorities, this was not an impossible task, but Rock would have to start from a standpoint of complete ignorance.