The van

 Just as Rock expected, Central Arkansas sports information director Steve East immediately recognized the vehicle, an equipment van Rock won with a bid of less than two-thousand dollars on govdeals.com. East laughed out loud when he saw it. "To tell you the truth, I didn't even know we sold it," he said. "It's been out here around the football field as long as I can remember."

It wouldn't stop

Television commercials that ran all day during coverage of the men's NCAA Basketball Tournament on CBS began to go haywire late in the evening. They gradually began to comment on themselves through a prolonged sequence of criticism and parody. There was some reason in place, one Rock thought involved a warning of worldwide or even universal catastrophe. He had never seen anything like it, and it wouldn't stop. He began to suspect Jim Nantz was drunk and fully responsible for this nearly insane circumstance.

Unimaginable

 A somewhat pretty local runner Rock had known for nearly ten years had been accused by multiple women of rape since1995, and evidence of her guilt seemed overwhelming. It was unimaginable, but there it was, easy to see, graphic and horrible. He spoke of it to his friend Elaine, who wondered how this woman had raped people when she was as young as thirteen years old. Rock understood the question, but he could not clear his mind of the nightmare before them. Neither could Elaine. "How is this possible?" she asked.

His first task

 It had become critical for Rock to get up and begin to prioritize every facet of his life. Moments later, shortly after he refilled his cat Joe's food bowl and as he sat in a maroon recliner with a spiral notebook in hand, Rock knew his first task was to call five horsemen at Oaklawn in Hot Springs. He had known from the night before how meaningful that was, but he was unprepared for the panic involved and how it had begun to seem like a matter upon which his very livelihood depended.

To properly seed

 This would, a short time later, help Rock to know he was awake rather than asleep and dreaming, but for the moment, as he lay in his front bedroom bed, he understood that his two-year-old housecat Joe was central to an effort to properly seed the first round of the four-school NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision playoffs. It was apparently an important issue since one of the four schools had a somewhat mediocre football team. Obviously, the other teams' connections wanted that school as a first-round opponent. Michigan head coach Don Shula, an NFL Hall of Fame inductee Rock admired as a child, was adamant about it and insisted Rock not let Joe out of the house.

A detailed report

 The moment he awoke, Rock was asked to investigate a matter unclear to him from the start. It seemed to have something to do with the Super Bowl and perhaps the availability of his living room-den as an area to view the game. Whatever this was, he suspected a need for a detailed, precise report, so he started to make a list of each item in the front rooms of his house. The living room came first, but approximately five minutes in, Rock began to wonder about this assignment. The most recent Super Bowl was played two weeks earlier. Why would anyone need to know these things now? The first of the items on Rock's list was that he had a television, and he would also never understand why the presence of a television exactly where one had been since mid-October 2002 could possibly have surprised him.

Nothing would change

 Rock knew exactly what happened. He had seen this before. His life had been arranged so that nothing would ever change. For starters, no time would pass. It would remain dawn forever, just as it had been when he awoke in his living room-den, with little more than an idea of daylight east of his house. The television program currently on would remain on forever, which was unfortunate since he had fallen asleep a few minutes after midnight with his TV tuned to a forty-three-year-old rerun of The Love Boat. He wondered if he could find football, baseball, golf, heck whatever, on the set in his back bedroom. It was far too cold to let Joe out, and he couldn't find his bifocals.

Masters Tournament

 Rock's housecat Joe won the Masters Tournament, and Rock was the only reporter there. Shortly after Joe's victory, Rock was besieged by editors from the paper in Little Rock. They demanded a story and wanted it the moment they called. Although Rock was nearly certain he had interviewed Joe moments after the cat's victory was complete, Joe wanted out. Rock couldn't imagine how he had gathered quotes in the first place and knew he could get no more. For Christ's sake, Joe was a fourteen-pound cat. On the other hand, Rock knew he had comments from Joe somewhere and that it was essential he find them.

Gaming

 This gaming business was all new to Rock. He had only recently learned it had risen to the level of an organized sport. His relative ignorance aside, the paper asked if he would report on a gaming tournament in Little Rock. To start, he asked a twenty-six-year-old Little Rock Hasher named Baileigh, the only active gamer he knew, what she knew about the tournament. "The favorite is a former Hasher named Josh," she said. Rock knew Josh well at one time, but he had moved away years earlier.

Improvement

 It had taken Rock well over a year, but he confirmed that he had at last trained his racehorse Joe to stay put until he himself was prepared to get out of bed for the morning. Joe seemed at ease after two firm "nos" from Rock, whereas before, he would have marched right across Rock's head in order to rattle the lampshade and knock things from the nightstand. It was a substantial improvement. The problem was, Rock had a barn full of horses he would also need to train how to behave at or near daybreak. He decided to go ahead and get up.

An old, beat-up car

 A man Rock remembered from more than thirty years earlier, a friend of Rock's acquaintance Bob Walsh, found an old car that Rock owned but had disappeared from his driveway several months earlier. It was turned upside down on the US Interstate 30 Arkansas River bridge between the downtowns of Little Rock and North Little Rock. Traffic was backed up for miles as Rock and Bob walked up a stairway to the bridge and the car. They easily flipped it over, but when Rocked reached for his keys, he realized before they were in hand that he had failed to pull from a kitchen drawer the ignition key to this old, beat-up car.

The weather station

 The crew that manned the weather station run from Rock's front bedroom and bathroom had employed Joe, Rock's cat, to become a meaningful device in their measurements of barometric pressure and the like. The forecast had called for high winds throughout Friday, and it was clear to the other weathermen from the way Joe stuck his head through the screen from the bed's bookshelf headboard that it was indeed windy out. All Rock knew was his cat was hungry.

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.