I don’t know if this happens to the rest of you. I know it happens to me, though. Some weird and/or goofy news story will pop up and the world and I will be like, “Huh, that’s weird and/or goofy,” and then a few days will go by and the world will move on to something else and I just will not. I’ll keep grinding away at all of it, not by choice. My brain won’t let it go. I’ll be ready to fall asleep and then whoosh in it flies and I’m up for another hour thinking about it. Examples include: Liam Gallagher claiming to own 2,000 tambourines; Barbra Streisand getting her dog cloned and writing an essay about it in the New York Times; and, most recently, The Rock going on Instagram and telling the world he ripped his mansion’s front gate off with his bare hands in a fit of power-outage-induced rage.
Context will help. Here is the post in question, complete with a picture of the mangled metal and busted brick foundation.
And here is his caption in blockquote form, just so we’re all fully informed before we move on.
Not my finest hour
, but a man’s gotta go to work.
We experienced a power outage due to severe storms, causing my front gate not to open.
I tried to override the hydraulic system to open the gates, which usually works when power goes out – but this time it wouldn’t.
Made some calls to see how fast I can get the gate tech on site, but I didn’t have 45min to wait.
By this time, I know I have hundreds of production crew members waiting for me to come to work so we can start our day.
So I did what I had to do.
I pushed, pulled and ripped the gate completely off myself.
Tore it out of the brick wall, severed the steel hydraulics and threw it on the grass.
My security team was able to meet the gate technician and welders about an hour later — and they were apparently, “in disbelief and equally scared”
Not my finest hour, but I had to go to work.
And I think I’mready to be #blackadam
#ripgates
He posted this last Saturday, almost a full week ago. I have been thinking about it ever since. Not, like, constantly. I’ve thought about other things this week too, mostly sandwiches I’ve eaten or would like to eat, but I have definitely thought about at least once a day. Usually more. I’m sure it’s perfectly healthy.
Here’s the main question I have at this point, the one I’m about to investigate: Did The Rock really do this? Did he really rip his mansion’s front gate off with his bare hands in a fit of power-outage-induced rage? Let’s do a little Case For, Case Against.
THE CASE FOR
OCCAM’S RAZOR
If given two competing hypotheses for the same outcome, the one that requires the fewest assumptions is preferable. The Rock is a big, strong dude — so big and strong that people all over the world call him “The Rock” even though his name is Dwayne — who says he ripped his front gate off with his bare hands in a fit of rage. I mean, I can dig that. Especially when you consider two additional factors:
- The Rock has never given us a reason to question his integrity in the past
- Prior to this happening, if I had come up to you on the street on the street and said “The Rock yoinked the front gate of his mansion off with his bare hands in a fit of rage,” I imagine you’d just accept it as a thing that is probable enough to believe without argument
Also, he posted this video of the damage later to back it up.
Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation is the one he’s given us.
I REALLY WANT IT TO BE TRUE
Close your eyes. Wait. Not now. Finish reading this next part first. Then close your eyes. And work up this image in your mind.
You are a very successful surgeon. You have worked hard your entire life: 80 hour weeks as a resident, hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt you’ve paid off, a booming practice that allowed you to purchase a mansion in an exclusive neighborhood. You wake up one morning — like any other morning, normal routine — and get dressed and eat a light breakfast and kiss your spouse and children goodbye for the day. (“I won’t be too late tonight,” you say.) You hop in your car — the luxury sports car you’ve dreamed about owning since you were a child — and back out of your driveway and start heading down your street. Your brain starts to drift a bit. You lose yourself in your music, with the top-down and the wind blowing. You follow the road around the bend and turn the volume up and HOLY SHIT THE ROCK IS RIPPING THE GATE TO HIS MANSION RIGHT OUT OF ITS BRICK FOUNDATIONS WITH HIS BARE HANDS.
Grunting, sweating, veins bursting out of his arms like a mountain range on a topographical map. The whole thing. Now picture the rest of that day, for you, the surgeon, after seeing that. There’s a non-zero chance it consumes you to the point you lose a patient on the operating table. I told you I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
OKAY, I DON’T HAVE A THIRD REASON, I JUST WANTED TO SAY HOW MUCH I ENJOY THE PICTURE AT THE TOP OF THIS SECTION
It’s a good picture.
This brings us to…
THE CASE AGAINST
THE INTERNET HAS BROKEN ME
Two problems here. The first is that years of pranksters and rascals and trolls playing tricks over the internet has conditioned my brain to smash the big red button that says “FAKE” whenever I see something that seems too cool or too perfect or that could possibly be used by some money-making entity to get me to spend my money in some way. Jimmy Kimmel has done this numerous times, as have Nathan Fielder and dozens of lesser imitators who want to exploit the gullibility of excitable people on the internet.
Which gets us to the second problem. In the first caption, at the very end, he mentions playing Black Adam in an upcoming movie, a true thing that is happening and is both good and fine. He includes the hashtag. There’s a simple, innocent explanation here, which is that The Rock is a relentless promoter and figured he could juice this a bit, a lemonade from lemons situation. But it also smells a little like viral marketing. This is not The Rock’s fault. This is the fault of the rest of the world. But it still resulted in my brain looking over at that “FAKE” button, just for a second.
IT SEEMS… IMPROBABLE?
Right? I don’t know. It’s a fuzzy line. Like, if your neighbor Carl said he did this, you’d be like “Shut up, Carl. And give me back my hedge trimmers.” (Freaking Carl.) And even after over a decade of watching The Rock do things in movies like, say, flex so hard that it bursts his recently broken arm right out of its cast, it still seems like… a lot?
Consider:
Why didn’t he just walk around the gate and call an Uber?
Why didn’t he have one of the many people waiting for him come pick him up?
Is The Rock revealing that he has, like, troubling anger issues?
Is The Rock okay?
The pandemic is stressing everyone out. I get it. If you need to talk about it, The Rock, please feel free to DM me.
TO BE HONEST, I DON’T HAVE A THIRD REASON FOR THIS ONE EITHER, I’M JUST REPEATING THE BIT FROM BEFORE
Something about this picture is the funniest thing in the world to me. I might be thinking about this for a week next. It’s probably the umbrella, though.
Anyway…
VERDICT
I am just going to go ahead and keep believing The Rock ripped the gate to his mansion out of its brick foundations with his bare hands in a fit of rage, in part because of all the reasons I laid out in the Case For section, and in part because I could really use this in my life right now. Like I said, everyone is stressed. Let me have this. Let me live in a world where The Rock is out here destroying his malfunctioning personal property like the Incredible Hulk. It’s nicer here.
Do not take this from me. Not yet, at least. I’m begging you.