The fog of fake war

When we left our hero (okay, it was only me) last week, he was searching his old gym bag desperately for his jock strap from high school in preparation for getting pelted mightily with paintballs at a bachelor party over the coming weekend. That event has happily passed, and I’m relieved to report that all the parts that were intact before last weekend continue to be intact today, as far as I’ve inventoried.

I almost bailed on the trip, mostly because Carrie Underwood came very close to convincing me that I was too old to go shooting twenty-five year olds out in the woods. If your car comes equipped with a device that can receive oscillating electromagnetic fields and convert them into sound, you may have heard one of Carrie’s songs seventeen times a day, no matter which frequency of radiated waves you chose to receive. This is because Carrie has released what it known as a crossover hit. The success of crossover hits are measured in units called “Shanias,” and Carrie’s song “Before He Cheats” stretches at least three Shanias long.

It seems rather unfair that songs from other genres can’t cross over to country radio. Keith Urban may escape from the country station and crawl all over the dial, but Kanye West still won’t get any playtime on Big Belt Buckle 98.1. Country radio only has an exit door, not an entrance, and country music listeners will often tell you that exit doors are only to be used for exiting.

Whenever I hear Carrie singing, “I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped-up four-wheel drive, carved my name into his leather seats. I took a Louisville slugger to both head lights, slashed a hole in all four tires, and maybe next time he'll think before he cheats,” all I can think is, “Is his insurance going to cover all that? I mean, if he has comprehensive, the glass on the headlights should definitely be covered, depending on his deductible.”

After realizing that I was having these thoughts, I almost canceled out on the paintball trip for fear that it was too late for me -- time to just give up, buy a velvet robe and subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. But I decided to go ahead and gun it anyway. Once you’re in the real world, you don’t too often get a chance to do things that scare you, at least not things that don’t involve PowerPoint presentations, so I cowboyed up and joined the group last Saturday for our faux shootout.

I give myself some credit for being brave enough to leave my old cup in the car, figuring that paintball technology has probably progressed to the point where the bullets just feel like soapy bubbles popping on your skin anyway.

“I bet you’re so pumped up that you don’t even feel it,” I told myself as we waited in line for our guns and camouflage jumpsuits.

That’s when one of the groom-to-be’s buddies turned to me and said, “Last time I did this, I got nailed right in the crotch.”

“Seriously?” I asked, the color draining from my face.

“Oh, yeah. Somebody zinged one right in there,” he said, proceeding to recount the incident in graphic detail. As soon as the words “swelled up like a grapefruit” came out of his mouth, my feet began running back to the car, totally independent of any direction from my brain, which was still trying to understand how a comparison to that section of the produce aisle could possibly be warranted.

Bringing that cup with me was the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Wearing the cup, a facemask and a camouflage suit, I felt invincible, like Achilles with a prosthetic foot. At least until the first paintball careened off my skull, leaving a goose egg that Jack would have climbed a beanstalk to steal.

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