“Gorgar…Huurrt!”

I’ve been trying to make a habit of posting at least one blog entry per day over the past year or so, with varying degress of success (as my archives will clearly show), but for my lack of posts this past weekend, I have an excuse: I was attending the bachelor party of one of my college roommates.
“Little Doug” (as opposed to me, “Big Doug”), as he’s known in some circles, is getting married this Friday and so his twin brother Dave decided to throw him a bachelor party up in the Poconos.
‘Twas a fun weekend, with a cookout on Saturday night and paintball at Skirmish on Sunday morning which was enjoyable in the extreme.
Our group of eleven was lumped in with about 30 other people, many of whom had their own equipment and a good deal of experience playing as a team. Unfortunately, none of those experienced players ended up on our team, so we ended up losing all but one round.
I’d never played at Skirmish before and I have to say, I was impressed with their operation. Their rental guns (Tipman 98 Customs) were in excellent condition, if a bit heavy when kitted out with nitrogen tanks and their fields were generally well-kept and fun to play. Their rental masks, however, were less than ideal for a humid day, as they tended to fog up the instant you began moving at more than a slight walk.
We played two rounds of “Attack and Defend” in a fortress-styled map, several rounds of Capture the Flag, including one “center flag” match whose rules Aron couldn’t quite grok until I explained “Think ‘Bombing Run’ from UT2k4.” Our ref, a guy by the name of Mike, offered the bachelor party his services for a couple of private games, so we finished the day out with a total elimination match (think “Team Deathmatch”) and a “Kill the Bachelor” match (think Running Man crossed with The Most Dangerous Game crossed with the Sonny Corleone tollbooth scene in The Godfather) in which Little Doug put up a valiant fight, taking two of the party down before being pelted into submission by a hail of paintballs. We counted a little over 40 paintball wounds on L.D., as he had taken a series of three shots to the facemask, after which he simply curled into the fetal position and waited for us to tire of hitting him. He was a good sport about it, though, and has some excellent welts to show for it.
The coup de grace of the paintball outing was a rousing game of “Revolutionary War” – we lined up in two lines facing each other, drew, aimed, fired and then took a step closer and repeated the process. This could quite possibly simultaneously be the coolest and dumbest thing I have ever attempted. We ultimately called the game when our “battle lines” were a mere 7 feet apart or so, not being total gluttons for punishment.
We hoofed it back to our Winnebago for a late lunch of burgers and potato salad, after which we all headed to our respective homes. All in all, it was an enjoyable weekend of running around acting like 18-year-olds in prime physical condition, with all the braggadocio and testosterone-induced chest thumping that accompanies such activities.
This morning, I was visited by the Lactic Acid Fairy who reminded me that, not only am I no longer 18 years old, but I am also not in prime physical condition and thus not cut out for running about in a forest, crouching behind trees for hours and generally playing a grown-up game of Cowboys n’ Indians, barring several weeks of intensive training and stretching exercises. That’ll show me.