The Paintball Post

This was a pretty fun week. Tuesday was Bruce’s actual birthday so Dawn and I worked ahead of time to make him feel adequately old. We swapped out his chair with a wheelchair Dawn took from Disney’s Sports complex , and tarted it up to look particularly ‘geezery’ with an I.V. some pill containers and various other old people adornments. I threw together a pretty funny shot of his with added wrinkles, grey hair, missing teeth etc, which we had on posters around the office aswell as on his cake. I have some footage of Bruce wheeling himself about and pulling off wheelies in his chair, but unfortunately missed it when he tipped over and fell backwards and cracked his head. Silly old people.

Today I got up early to head to a guy named Allen’s place up in Apopka to do some paintball with Brian, Bruce and a few others. The setup there was awesome. Allen lives next to some land that’s owned by a housing company that isn’t in use. For zoning reasons the area is covered with thin, but very tall pine trees that only have pines at the very top. The end result is some awesome cover and lots of space to run. They use the area fairly routinely, and have set up bunkers, tarp blockades, a central trench and various other terrain mods too.

There was a lot of sitting about with the country boys drinking beers and recounting matches between rounds which was very chill. Allen brought a massive CO2 tank for refills so there was no reason to track back to the house. He also demoed his homemade ‘paintball-bazooka’ which was pretty impressive. The guy’s a good few inches over 6-foot and built like an ox (he’s a farmer) and was blown backwards by this thing when it went off. You could hear it for miles.

I had a great time, spent the majority of the day out there unloading on people. We were using borrowed gear (again from the Disney complex) and Brian’s guns, and were unfortunately the only guys not sporting automatic, supped up guns. One guy (also named Jamie) is a professional paintballer, and was touting something like three-grand in his marker alone. So yeah… kinda got my ass kicked. Only a handful of welts to prove it though, plus I got to shoot my boss in the face. All in all a good day