Paintball: Where the savage can be savage

Though the notion of paintballing seems contrary to my innate
surfer “aloha,” truth is, sometimes you got to drop
some “˜bows (elbows) to get your own. It’s analogous to
50 Cent’s “get rich or die trying” attitude.

My closest friends can attest to the fact that beneath the
outwardly chill Hector, there’s a tension lurking, like a
deadly cobra poised to strike. With graduation nearing and no job
prospects in sight, the cobra’s tongue is flickering in
anticipation.

Such was my mental state when paintball arrived this past
Sunday.

Even though I absolutely bruise like a peach, paintballing was
the perfect medium for sublimating my repressed macho, aggressive
tendencies. It’s like, hey, I’m really stressed and I
want to shoot somebody, but not. As 2002 UCLA alumnus Kyle Arneson
put it, “stop, or my mom will pretend to shoot!”

I decided to take this paintball experience as an interesting
case study in human nature.

If my theory was correct, in the heat of paintballing, pretenses
guarding social behavior would strip away. We’d get to,
quote, unquote, “see the real person.” This is slightly
more science-ey than my previous experiment, which involved getting
people boozed up to see if they were a “happy drunk” or
a “mean drunk.”

Abraham Lincoln once said, “Nearly all men can stand
adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give
him power.” The power to shoot paint-filled balls really,
really fast is awesome. Would one shoot paintballs really, really
fast for the betterment of mankind? Or rather be a huge prick that
thinks it’s funny to shoot teammates in the back?

I gathered a group of 12 equally troubled, equally available
friends who didn’t flake at the last minute. Together,
“Hector and His Ride or Die Dawgz” (as I dubbed the
group) dealt with our personal psychoses one really, really fast
paintball at a time.

Some psychoses however were more blatant than others. For
example, high school acquaintance and USC golfer Nico
Bollini’s RSVP e-mail spoke volumes of all kinds of mental
deficiencies. And I quote, “u (sic) will feel the rath (sic)
of nico (sic) at paintballing… just make sure Im (sic) NOT on ur
(sic) team.”

You know how in articles they write “(sic)” so we
know that’s what the source actually wrote and we don’t
think it’s the reporter that’s dumb? I wish that in my
writings they would put “(SICK!)” after I write a good
line. That way people would know that what I just wrote was sick,
the way wake-boarders use the term to mean “good.”

Before examining Nico’s psychosis though, I had to get
myself psyched. On my way there, I listened to Tupac so that by the
time I arrived, I was mugging (mugging- to look hard-core.
Etymological root: “mug shot”).

I was happy to note that my late arrival got the other members
of “Hector and His Ride or Die Dawgz” equally psyched
and a little angry. If my case study was to proceed, I needed my
test subjects as aggressive as possible.

Though most paintball aficionados are understandably male, we
had a pair of girls in “Hector and His Ride or Die
Dawgz” crew. Don’t let your preconceptions blind you.
Women are just as aggressive as men, only they are more refined and
subtle about it. It’s all mental warfare with them, see.

While we guys tried bum-rushing the opponent in trenches and
shooting them in the groin, because groin shots are funnier and
worth more, the women would go behind enemy lines and pretend to be
friends with the other team. All the while, they spread malicious
rumors so that by the end, the enemies’ social lives were
destroyed, they were driven to eating disorders, and everyone at
school knew that they wore headgear at night. Forget capturing the
flag. Those women made you wish you’d never been born.
(SICK!)

In the end, did I unravel the mystery of human nature? Yes.
It’s the groin shot.

Cover my inner child while I flank the id at
[email protected].