One might wonder - What is a guy with no depth perception, speed, agility, or blood thirst doing signing up for paintball?
Getting shot, that's what.
One of my best friends was getting married and he wanted his groomsmen to play paintball before he tied the knot.
He decreed that I had to wear a bright orange vest and skull cap because he thought it would be fun to watch me get pelted with rock solid paint pellets. Because I'm a complete sap and figured that it was his weekend, I reluctantly complied.
One of the most interesting things about paintball is that you end up playing with other strangers who, in many cases, devote horrifically significant portions of their lives to the game. When we scoped out the competition, I realized how far out of my league I was.
Perhaps the best part of paintball was the angry teenager who gave us the instructions.
After this warm welcome, it was time to rumble. I must say getting shot by those paintballs is no picnic. Those suckers hurt! The pain involved in getting shot really raised the stakes as we ran through the woods, dove behind trees, and holed up in bunkers.
One major problem I had was that I couldn't fit my glasses under the face mask. Also, the mask fogged up instantly whenever I put it on. This is a bit of an issue because vision, surprisingly, is an important component of paintball. Everything looked like this:
The weird part was, I actually kinda liked paintball. There was a sort of tactical/team element that really appealed to me.
Actually, if I'm being honest, it was more like this:
I really did get kinda into it.
(I had to tell myself to go easy on the Frost, Conrad, and Heller (and Bruce Willis) references.)
In the end, the teen with the attitude complimented me by saying I was good at crouching.
I suppose there are worse compliments you can get in paintball.
But not many.
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