Is There Ever Too Much Laser Tag

Saturday was too good to be true. Sadly, it turned out to be a dream. I woke up and said, "But if it was possible to have a giant pet crab, I would totally ride him through the abandoned metro system of Moscow." Then I got a call from a girl who invited me to play laser tag. LASER TAG! As it turned out she was looking for my roommate. I told her I'd pass the message along then I went in his place. Oh, sorry, Nathan couldn't come tonight. But I'd love to play laser tag.

There were maybe eight of us at Fastlanes in Rogers, which is like a really big Chuck E. Cheese that sells beer. Scratch that. It's like a really big Chuck E. Cheese. Apparently thirsty dads provide a steady flow of income. The laser tag arena there is shaped like a pirate ship. They play music from the Disney movie Pirates of the Caribbean. Laser pirates? This place is like every scifi novel cover that I've ever ripped off the spine and mailed to Emma Watson as a part of our "correspondence." She sends her replies via her lawyer.

For some reason, Fastlanes divides all players up into three teams - Blue, Red, and Green. The vests actually light up with the team color, so it's easy to tell who you're betraying when you shoot them in the back. The eight of us were supposed to be Red; then my date and I switched sides. There was a single dad and his two boys - Isaiah, 7, and Michael, 9. They were Green. We wanted to be Green, too.

(The dad had a shaven head and the word "STYX" tattooed onto the back of his skull in Old English letters. I asked him if he was willing to die for the Green team. Immediately afterwards I regretted asking him that.)

Inside the pirate ship, we tried to stick together; after every small victory I would yell, "Green Team!" and the two little boys would echo me. Soon my date and I were separated from the family. We did a little bit of sniping, a little bit of close quarters combat, and a little bit of trickery (I would send her into an ambush to take the brunt of the fire, then I would mop up unsuspecting enemies. I told her later that teamwork was the key to any relationship. She said she never wanted a relationship with me. I said that was because she wasn't a team player.)

Every so often we would see sorority girls fleeing some monster, then Isaiah or Michael would pop out after them firing wildly and yelling, "Green Team!"

We were great at this. Eventually, the little boys and I set up a kill zone near the cannons. We slaughtered an entire team of Asians (Blue Team).

After the match ended, we exited proud only to find a scoring error. According to Fastlanes, Blue won with 1225 points, Red was second with 500, and Green was last with 0 points. I asked the attendant why it was so, and he said we were disqualified because I had been using my date as a human shield. I told him that's what girlfriends were - human shields. She told him that she wasn't, nor ever would be my girlfriend.

An Inside Look at Fraternity Emails

Every Sunday, one of the girls in Kappa Kappa Gamma sends out an email to all her sorority sisters reminding them of chapter on Monday. Invariably, she gets twenty plus emails back with snarky comments meant to frustrate and/or amuse her. Last night, instead of replying directly to the sender, one girl accidentally sent her fun filled and private response to the whole chapter. Someone let me read it. I'm paraphrasing here:

"YO YO YO YOU GURL I SEE YOU DROPING THAT THANG WEARING THEM BELLS WITH YOUR ECKO WHITES! WE BE GOING TO CHAPTA TOGETHER TONIGHT!"

It went on for several sentences. When she came into lunch, all the girls stood up and yelled, "YO YO YO." She was embarrassed, not only because the chapter read it, but because somehow it got sent to the head of their National Advisor, an older woman who sits on the National Council. She had to explain what Ecko whites were. To me. I didn't know.

I'm going to cheat with this post and copy some emails that I sent to the chapter in preparation for our Laser Quest. I realize 75% of my reader base is fraternity brothers, but this is for the four friends I have that aren't in BYX. Pertinent information includes our fraternity's Mom's Day was Saturday, and also I can say whatever I want because I'm a senior.

Is your mom not coming till Saturday? Does your mom live in Fayetteville and you don't necessarily want to hang out with her on a Friday night? Then put your face next to my shoe because I'm about to give you a kick in the teeth!

Tron here. I've reserved 10 spots at Laser Quest this Friday from 8 to 9; I need fellow soldiers. I'm talking about LASERS - the kind they use to create fractals and experiment on turltes with. It's going to be BIBLICAL, but instead of trumpets, angels are blowing LASERS out of their mouths and making Venus implode! Imagine that - there are few who can.

It costs 14 dollars a man. For 14 dollars, we get two twenty minute games in a huge arena involving thirty puntable children, and we also get our own party room for downtime. Like a birthday! But instead of a cake, we're eating LASERS and putting a kid's head in a toilet! BYX RULES!

This is a BROTHERHOOD EVENT WITH LASERS! The last time this happened, we had to invade Iraq. Great job Saddam! If you want to go, email me directly at dctrumbo@uark.edu. I need to know by tomorrow night. If we don't have 10 guys, we can't do it. We'll leave Fayetteville around 5, and we'll be back by midnight.

Tron McKnight

This was followed three and a half hours later with another email.

OMG THIS JUST GOT REAL. I just got off the phone with J.C. who works the desk at Laser Quest. That's right - Jesus Christ himself runs that light show. Talk about a sweet retirement gig. It turns out in the two hours between calling him, thirty beautiful girl scouts booked our 8 o'clock time. THIS PLACE IS THAT HOT. It's like that time your cat accidentally crawled into the oven with the meatloaf. Or was it put there?

Nevertheless, our time is now six o'clock on Friday - and this is great news. We'll meet at 3:30 at the IM parking lot because we have to be a Laser Quest in Tulsa at 5:30 for briefing! You can still come if you wear boxers, but prepare to pee in them. AND GUESS WHAT - we're up to twenty people now. To give you some perspective, that's how many skulls are in my basement. That's a lot of laser tag participants!

We're leaving from Baum at 3:00 because I want to be safe - that's how I've been able to keep those skulls in my basement (if you put skeletons in your closet, someone is going to find them. Don't be a moron). If you're leaving before 3:00, text me so I don't have to track you down, retrieve the seven dollars, then put your skull in my basement.

I've attached a pictoral representation for Jessie Green. If he sees it and wants to go, open an email and let him make his mark. He deserves equal treatment.

Jessie Green is our current treasurer. Before he got elected, I started a smear campaign that painted him as illiterate. Though he was still elected, I count the campaign a success because many new members honestly believe he has trouble reading. In the picture he is depicted as a yellow dinosaur.Tron

A-NU-BIS!

I played on a AAU basketball team called the Vipers in early high school. I hated that team. We were second tier - all the good players were on the Hawks - and I was still riding the bench. Also, all the starters were socially maimed and the man who started in front of me was mean. His name was Ryan Hoover and he used to throw elbows in practice. I think he may be in the military now.

The only upside to the tournaments the Vipers played was when we were in Tulsa and we went to Laser Quest between games. Laser Quest is a three story dark room filled with death traps and older men who have gotten really good at laser tag. Almost forty people can play in this laser tag free for all the Quest puts on. Sometimes I would tell Hoover we were a team, then I'd shoot him in the back and blame it on a kid. Then Hoover would hunt down the kid and I'd have to listen to his screams.

Last night I took twenty fraternity brothers on a trip back to Laser Quest. I had to make reservations earlier in the week because it's so busy. Our group reserved two slots alongside a triple birthday full of twelve year olds.

Most of the guys who came were new members; they were my pledges last semester. Once during Rush Week we took potentials to Lokomotion, which houses the closest and lamest laser tag apparatus. Once the employee on duty locked us in, I took off my vest and shirt and began to wrestle the pledges as they screamed, "Why won't you die!" Four days later, we christened 84 pledges. And the manager of Lokomotion said that wasn't appropriate behavior. What does he know?

Before we went into the arena, I saw the twelve year olds pointing at me and giggling. This recalled terrible memories of third grade, and since my therapist has been encouraging to confront my fears, I asked one of them what his Laser Quest codename was. "Bigfoot," he said, "What's yours?" I asked him why he wanted to know. "So I can murder you."

I don't care how Hollywood portrays it - laser tag is chaos. It's sweat and light and smoke that may be from a machine but also may be from that pink eyed teenager running the desk with a name tag that reads "Stitch." A few of my brothers asked me if I wanted to team up. I told them no: "I work alone." Then I ran through the three story arena yelling "BIGFOOT! SHOW YOURSELF!"

I went to D.C. last spring break with five other fraternity brothers. Two of them were seniors at the time, so it was a last goodbye of sorts. On our way back, we stopped in Lexington, KY, where we had to drop Ben Rector off at a wedding. There was a laser tag palace close to our hotel. Unlike Laser Quest, this place assigned you nicknames - you didn't get to pick. Ben got the name Anubis. We were on teams, and I got paired with some easily scared eight year olds. I tried to rally their courage, but when Ben would come up the ramp stomping his feet and yelling, "A-NU-BIS!" they would scatter. I found one of them afterwards holding his head in a corner and whispering to himself, "He never stops, never stops."

Bigfoot beat me both games. After the first game, I told him he may have won the battle, but it was a fake battle anyways and I was going to punch him in the back of his vest when he wasn't looking. After the second game I just walked out in a cold fury. On the ride home, I was sitting next to Tyler Taggart, who pointed out the moon in the black sky. It was red. "Blood has been spilled this night," he said.