hell if i know

Just back from another fine weekend of practice. Except, our act is not together, whatever it is, and whenever I run to the easiest bunker in town I get shot stupid about 20 seconds in. Questions about next year are right in our faces now. Do we want to keep going, who's in, what would it take. Sponsorship, a home field, a full squad, consistent practice? We're counting players, thinking of holding open tryouts, thinking of moving, thinking of asking people on, considering pyramid schemes, something to make it work. And if it can't work, we need to figure it out so guys can get on with life or find a team and keep going. To the guys mature enough to be able to give a straight answer, thanks.

I'm going to out and admit it - I often consider quitting paintball. Some Sundays you can't take three steps without getting lit up, and you drive two hours home wondering what the hell you're doing with your time and money. Some days the only other people at the field are there for a dorm trip or to test their battle skills or some bullshit, plus one kid who thinks he's hot shit and spends all day screaming and overshooting the new guys. Some days only three guys can make it and you can't do shit, but you got up at 5:30 and came out here to sit in a parking lot. Sometimes it's when you have to pay the credit card bill you racked up for air fare, hotel, rental car, and paint and suddenly you're staying in every night until the first comes around. Sometimes your friends from the rest of life wonder why you keep doing this, after you pass yet again on another soccer league with a bunch of guys you love, or skip out on a friend's wedding because the team needs you to fly out to East Bumfuck and put some paint on some people just so. And some days, you watch a couple games from the stands and go "what the fuck is this that we're doing here?"

If you're playing to impress people, you're going to be disappointed. You learn that talking about paintball is about as good at parties as describing the chain of events that led to you switching fabric softeners. 95% of the time you end up on the wrong end of some raised eyebrows that say "seriously?", or some jackass tries to tell you about how hard his gun can shoot and how his cousin used to have this angel.

But then Wednesday rolls around and you can't wait for Sunday so you can show up and do your thing and blast some people. Thursday afternoon your roommate catches you pretending to snap-shoot behind the couch, and you have to try and play it off like you were stretching. One weekend you go play by yourself and suddenly these guys you spend your Sundays with don't have your back, and there's no way in hell you're going to trust that kid wearing the camo to get your tape so you can do your thing, and absolutely zero chance people are going to shift and lock the zones back down when the snake side starts to drop. Field layouts for the next tournament are released and automatically half your work day is up in smoke. And when it's you who spots the gap and takes the other team apart, you wonder how you could ever give this up.

Recent quotables from the field:

"It's 9:00, where the fuck is everybody? And why can't I feel my fingers?"
"That's the rage."

"I'm seriously going to cry the day we decide not to be a team anymore."

"Left nipple's hot!"

"Some guy with a chest protector on bunkered me."
(chest protectors are the Smirnoff Ice of paintball. Unless you have boobs, in which case protect away.)

"Who else gets to do what we get to do? We travel around the country shooting people. We get to do something we love. When are we going to be able to do this again?"







apologies to Matty Marshall, who said it better than I did.

Paintball Vol. 1 - History & an Absence of Camo

Alright, I'm gonna educate those of you who are unitiated. It has somehow gotten so that my only hobby is paintball, which represents significant cutbacks in hobby breadth from my hobby heyday in high school where i actually played sports and shit. What can I say, I'm out of shape. Anyway, I play a lot of paintball. Not pinball, not ping-pong. Ok, some pinball. But mostly, paintball.

I've been wanting to try paintball since sometime in the early 90's, but my parents never let me. My mom has since commented that knowing what they know now they wish they had let me. I might actually be good or something, instead of just acceptably decent. Its just as well, I suppose, since I probably wouldve gotten hit and cried and quit anyway. But I digress. Been playing since 2001, been playing nearly weekly for a little over a year. Yes it is expensive, yes I am completely broke, no I'm still not that good.

A quick note of history: Paintball began ~25 yrs ago in the woods, a bunch of friends stalking eachother and playing guns. In the past few years it has come almost entirely out of the woods and onto a sort of concept field known as 'speedball,' where the bunkers are all man-made and even on both sides of the field, and the field is generally small enough that you can shoot the opposing team off the break and the games take no more than 5 minutes.

For whatever reason, I am fucking terrible at woodsball. I started in the woods, everybody starts in the woods, and you go out for the first time with your friends because you want to play guns and see how you would do or whatever. Its nerdy, but I've accepted it. I should also point out that once you've gone a couple times, the camoflauge/military-look-alike thing gets old, and you end up being glad its becoming a sport in its own right. I am confident that in a real military event I would suck just as bad having never played paintball. None of the regulars at my field wear camo except as a joke or to be retro, nobody thinks they're a sniper, nobody calls the paint" bullets," "ammo," "rounds," nobody calls the paintguns "weapons," there is not a single tree or shrub at said field, and there is no rule that if you get shot in the leg you just hop around on one leg but keep playing, although I'm not saying that last one wouldn't be funny. My point is, we're trying to distance ourselves from militia types here.

PAINTBALL =/= MILITIA TYPES. well for some people it does, but I think they were probably militia types before they found paintball, and they really need to leave me alone.