Stage 9: Immovable Object vs. Irresistable Force

Heh heh heh ... "Stage Nine". Everyone not in Halifax: "Huh?"

Anyways - the trip back from Cole Harbour was pretty uneventful. Cee and I were kind of concerned about how we had lashed the two cabinets into the back of the van. Meaning, because we didn't lash them up at all, we expected to hear a gargantuan "KERBOOM" and then the screams of doomed motorists as they swerved to their fiery deaths while trying to avoid the gigantic WrestleFest cabinet that was rolling down the street towards them.

Our fears were misplaced, as the cabs barely shifted during transit. Of course, this wasn't thanks to our positive chi, it was because they both weighed a bloody ton. This was to become extraordinarily clear to us within the next few minutes.

The rain started to pick up again and I made the executive decision to haul the Tetris cab into the house first. Because the Allan Street HQ has a small five step front porch, I reckoned the smaller Tetris cab would be a good primer for the big haul yet to come.

Having somehow had the foresight to scorch a path into the spare room beforehand, Cee and I managed to strap this cab to a dolly and get it into the house without resorting to crazy schemes. It wasn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, but the dolly made it physically possible to pull off. My girlfriend Holly was good enough to pose with it in this really unflattering picture of the cab in it's new home in the spare bedroom.

The larger cab was a markedly different tale. Even as we wrestled this behemoth around in the van, the sheer mass of this thing was overwhelming. At one point, I found myself unexpectedly bearing the brunt of the whole thing on my forearms - while the twin "snap" noises of my ulnas being halved like twigs would have been cool to hear, I chose instead to frantically scream at Cee to help me before I was killed by this machine landing directly on my sternum. The experience left me with multiple bruises on my arms which were extremely painful, but I was able to milk them later for extra affection from Holly. Score!

After 20 minutes of zealous effort, we managed to walk this goddamned machine to the foot of the steps of the house. The tape measure I was keenly wearing on my belt like a moron had told me previous that the smallest doorway we had to traverse was 26" wide. This Wrestlefest monster was 25 1/3" wide, which for all you people out there with spatial dysphoria, means we had about the width of your index finger to wiggle this fridge-sized object inside.

Unfazed, I gallantly suggested we just "haul this bitch in", the bitch referring to the rain-soaked 65-stone object that was now leering at my neighbors from the front of my yard like a bloody Easter Island head. The attached picture really does this one some justice.

Drunk with power and possibly Powerade (2 for $2 at the Robie Street Irving!), Cee and looked at one another and nodded grimly. The time for a crazy scheme was upon us.

Summoning our inner Mythbuster, we jerryrigged a crude sled out of the moving dolly with the intention of "effortlessly" sliding this elephantine object up the slick stairs and into the front porch of my house. The following discourse was a lot like this:



Me (as Adam): "This idea is pure genius! There's no chance this will fail!"


Cee (as Jamie): "I have grave reservations about the safety and plausibility of your plan."


Me (as Adam): "Wheeeee! Arcade games here we come!"


Cee (as Jamie): "Nrrrrg." *fiddling with mustache*



And not unlike many of the myths these two bozos bust, this sounded a lot easier to pull off on paper. We literally shoved this thing with all our might only to have it lurch upwards like a drunken bear and damn near fall on us. Strike one.

But unlike baseball, there would be no other strikes. The steadily increasing rain was making this cab almost impossible to get a grip on, our shoulders and backs were already screaming in pain from the first cabinet and common sense decided to make a rare showing - if this thing fell on one of us, that person would be be killed. No Neil-esque hyperbole here, this thing would literally end a person's life if it slipped and toppled onto them. Legs and arms would be broken, ribs flattened and skulls opened if we made a mistake. This was becoming a dangerous task. We lay the cab on it's side like a wounded rhino and I threw a tarp over it to shield it from the downpour while we debated what the hell we were going to do.

At this point, an unexpected interloper made the scene - Otis Wien, former Allan Street roomate, closet redneck and general all-around good guy. He definitely had the quote of the day as he inquired as to what in blazes were were up to, uttered as I dramatically tore away the tarp to reveal the cabinet laying on it's side on the lawn:

Otis: "Holy fuck ... you KILLED an arcade machine!!"

We pleaded with him to help us drag this ponderous corpse of a cab into the house, and he begrudgingly agreed. Thankfully, that common sense I spoke of earlier was still floating in the air and we quickly abandoned all hope of actually getting this thing into the house in one piece. Discharged from his task, Otis fled.

I stood in the rain, staring at the green tarp, wondering what in blazes we were going to do. Cee was on the horn with his brother Jamie, the van had to be returned and I was beginning to feel the dull ache of my shoulders and knees beginning to swell. I thought to myself "how was I going to get this thing off the lawn into the house?"


The answer, as it almost always is for all of life's problems, was surprisingly simple - hammers, and lots of them.