The purple couch was at a sixty degree angle, wedged between the ceiling, the stair railing and the door to the room we were trying to move it into.

There was no need to hold the couch anymore, it would stay where it was indefinitely. We had time to try and figure out how to get it where it needed to go. The five of us (three grown men and two women) tried to pool our brain power for a solution.

The house was old, over a hundred years, and nestled in the East Downtown area of Albuquerque. My guitarist was moving from a smaller house in the North Campus area of town. The thing about old houses were these small doorways. Obviously, whoever designed this place never thought about big puffy purple couches and how to place them in the living room.

We mused about the furniture habits of people a hundred years ago. Did they have them built into the rooms they were to inhabit? Were they small love seats rather than big couches? Or maybe they just had collections of chairs. It's possible that comfort was not a consideration back then.

It took a great deal of effort just to get the thing through the front door. And this after hours of moving. We were all tired and ready for a drink, but there was no possibility of leaving the couch angled in the front hallway as some post-modernistic artistic statement on the pomposity of 21st century furniture.

After a few minutes of joking around, and all of us taking a gulp or two of beer, we tried again.

Maybe we could take it down the hallway, through the kitchen and back it into the living room through the dining room. We unwedged it, moved it over the railing and pushed it down the hallway only to find a six inch corner before the kitchen door made it impossible. And now the couch was kind of jammed in the hallway.

If we'd measured before we started moving this couch in, we'd have found it was too big for any of the doorways. By at least a few inches.

And yet, we got it through the front door, which was, by any measure, at least three inches too narrow to accommodate any one side of the couch.

I think it was our initial triumph through the front door that made us persevere to the conclusion of this complicated geometrical problem. How we accomplished that first feat, none of us could really say. So there must have been some magic in that purple couch. Something that made it shrink for just a few seconds--if we could just say those magic words once again.

I didn't have much furniture when I moved a few months back. An old couch, an older chair, a table for my computer and my bed (also rather old). Everything else was pretty easy. The heaviest things were my many boxes of CDs. But getting any of those things through the door of my apartment hadn't been a problem.

This moving day was a consolidation of a couple of places (a three-bedroom house and a one bedroom apartment), and furniture for five people (two adults and three children). And while those steps up to the second story were treacherous when carrying hundreds of pounds of wooden dressers and desks, it was the purple puffy couch that almost did us in.

Even that 250 pound organ was rather simple in comparison. Heavy, but simple.

We had the couch perpendicular to the floor in front of the door it needed to fit through. Suddenly, it looked possible to me. I could see it fitting. And then so did another of us. Together we urged a final assault to solve our furniture dilemma.

"Tip it this way." "The banister is still in the way." "No, the other way." And then, "PUSH!!!"

And the push took about fifteen seconds, but then, suddenly, there was that big puffy purple couch sitting in the living room.

A quick decision was reached that the couch would never move from this room. When they moved out (whenever this happened in the future), the couch would stay.

But for now, there was a place to sit and watch the TV. Which, in these modern times, is the centerpiece of any living room.

Matt Worley found that Ten High whiskey is just a step above paint thinner--and yet strangely satisfying after a half an hour of couch origami.