Is the Cure to Male Loneliness Playing War with Your Friends?

The Woodland Center Correctional Facility is a high-security prison that serves specifically as an infirmary for the criminally insane. Across the street, outside its gates and barbed wire, I too have gone crazy—with how much fun I’m having at the Futureball Paintball and Airsoft Park.

It’s Sunday afternoon and there’s a heat wave. Onsite are only sweaty men. They’ve come not only to play but to fight the emptiness. To fulfill an urge deep in their bones. To go to war.

Break time is only 15 minutes between games. It’s a chance to cool down and restock. Everyone is replenishing something, whether filling their mouths with water, their magazines with ammunition, or their lungs with nicotine.

Next to me are two men in their late forties sucking on cigarettes. One of them is shirtless with a scorpion tattoo on his right shoulder. He is proudly sporting a distended abdomen—bloated by consumption rather than privation—in that nymphal stage between pot belly and beer gut. His torso attracts my attention because it’s covered in polka dots. Paintball welts.

He bends forward and sticks his face into the man-made breeze. A fan slurps water from a Home Depot pail. It blows mist into his face. He sighs in relief, then looks at his friend. Then at me. And probably not for the first time today, he blurts out: “I’m too old for this shit.”