This past weekend I went with eight other guys to a paintball course deep in the woods of Vermont. Our group should have been much larger, but several people canceled as punk-ass bitches tend to do. If you’ve never played paintball, you should know that it hurts, sometimes quite a bit. A direct hit from a paint pellet is similar in pain to being snapped hard with a fat rubber band, like those assholes undoubtedly did to you at least once as a child. The plus side to what seems like an extremely lame thing to subject yourself to is your ability to shoot back. It’s warfare, except no one really gets killed. You get to inflict pain on your friends and let your inner Shih-Tzu run wild. Paintball kicks ass.

After going through the obligatory safety speech and marching out into the courses, we split into two teams of four and proceeded to blast each other to high hell. Since there were so few people that day, the rounds were short and at times anticlimactic, but we tried to make the best of it.

After a few rounds, our referee told us that there was another group of eight people coming onto the courses and asked us if we would like to join up with them. We agreed, but immediately started worrying that we were about to get pasted by a crew of off-duty National Guardsmen or police officers. We waited, resigned to whichever bad-ass might show up.

Much to our surprise, our new opponents were a group of middle schoolers. They crossed onto our course, accompanied by some chaperoning parents with more than a little bit of apprehension in their faces. Here we were, a bunch of early thirties men, sweating, swearing and splattered with paint and these kids were being expected to give up their birthday party paintball games in lieu of getting their asses handed to them by a bunch of surly adults. Awesome.

We’d rented our equipment, so we were all carrying guns that were at the low end of the ass-kicking spectrum. These kids, however, were decked out with weapons ranging from good quality to fully automatic death machine. Some of them were sporting body armor, while others had improvised by stuffing pieces of cardboard underneath their clothing. We had no such accoutrements, only the clothes on our backs and an extra nearly twenty years worth of pent-up rage and disappointment. We were ready to kill.

Our first few rounds had the kids pitted against the adults which resulted in a complete bloodbath since many of them were too chickenshit scared to get shot that they rarely fired straight or at all. It was a thrilling fact that, at the shriveled and defunct age of thirty, I was being given the chance to deliver some serious smackdown on children that when I was at their age, would beat the fuck out of me and toss my ass in a dumpster every day at recess. I made it my calling to terminate their asses with extreme prejudice.

After several one-sided rounds, we split up and created two new teams, evenly mixing it up between kids and adults. This led to better action and some surreal moments of running into some area, knowing a twelve year old has got your back. At times we had to yell at them when, finding themselves blessed with some good cover, they made camp and prepared to hide put until the round was over. I would be getting pinned down, trading fire against two people and the kid next to me would be curled up with his gun lying on the ground.

Still, it was a great time. I walked away with several welts that have now blossomed into some beautiful golf ball sized bruises. Personally I think being able to shoot children with paintball guns may be one of the best things to ever happen to me. The only thing that might possibly top it would be shooting old people or maybe midgets.

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