Archive for the '"Guy Stuff"' Category

Last night I par­tic­i­pated in Veneer Magazine’s Release Party. And by release party I mean a paint­ball “party” where the writ­ers of the arti­cles read­ing their work over a mega­phone were defended by three edi­tors while every­one else (act­ing as the read­ers) pelted them 10 times.

For those of you who do not know, Veneer is a new mag­a­zine, the first, put out by Marriage Publishing House. This party was Flint’s idea and he was extremely excited for it. He is the man behind Veneer and he put together the first few games. He also got the worst beat­ing of anyone.

It was the first time I had ever held, pointed, or shot a gun of any sort and I got really ner­vous when we started putting on masks and the guys started mak­ing fake cups. I had no idea what to expect. Suddenly we all were trans­formed into super-crazy-gun-wielding-combat-soldiers all instructed to aim for each other. Some peo­ple were way into to. The entire field was wild as well. Totally cov­ered in grease. Totally. The arena floor was com­posed of about two feet of bro­ken paint­ball shells which are filled with what seemed to be a very greasy sub­stance that cov­ered all our clothes and gave every­thing a gross slick coat­ing. That is what we were run­ning around in, squat­ting, snip­ing, cre­at­ing chaos in…grease.

I must say that it was thrilling. I must say that it was also very haunt­ing. Extremely sav­age and fierce. Although some played it safe at the begin­ning and would chill when the horn was blown, some went for the glory, not giv­ing a fuck and not duck­ing behind shit! Straight up in your face run­ning directly towards you shoot­ing 200mph pel­lets right toward your head!!! Our nog­gins were all cov­ered with masks which were fierce-looking SWAT team type of hel­mets and allowed no air cir­cu­la­tion at all. I thought about the masks a lot today. The way your breath was right in your face, the heavy pant­ing and the loud shots of fire whizzing by. The way a ball would bust open on your mask was one of the most innocu­ous yet ter­ri­fy­ing things I’ve ever expe­ri­enced. It only hap­pened once but made my heart skip a whole mea­sure of beats before I real­ized that I wasn’t in pain, just amaz­ing slow-motion shock.

We all got hit a bunch of times as most of the games ended when every­one had either a) been hit (either in a cer­tain place on their body or num­ber of times), or b) hit every­one else and was the only per­son remain­ing. Flint, the poor-guy, took it deep with the welts and bruises, some of them look­ing really gnarly today. I am def­i­nitely sore today but my hits weren’t too deep, the worst and most sore being on the fatty part of my legs. Even the one that some­how snagged me on my ass was pretty mel­low today.

I had a fun time and although I’m not instantly an avid paint­ball enthu­si­ast I am glad that I was able to be a part of this expe­ri­ence. On a whole other spec­trum of thought about the event check out Claire’s thoughts and pic­tures on the offi­cial Veneer post.