Back before my daughter was born, I used to play in a live-action role playing game. If you've never heard of LARP, just think of the opening scene of *Stranger Things*, just in full costume in the middle of a field.
Once a month, I would pack up and drive four hours out of my way to a campsite where my friends and I would pay $40 a head for the opportunity to beat the crap out of each other with foam swords every weekend. Here I am in full regalia, awkward as hell in my costume:
*So goofy.*
LARPing is great fun because you get to leave your worldly worries behind and pretend to be someone else for a while. At camp, I wasn't my usual self, worried about work and life; I was Dhalgren of Feoh, stalwart defender of the Cloister of Varden and Warden of the Night Watch. It's a great way to blow off steam - you can hit someone pretty hard with one of those foam boffer weapons and not do any real damage, as long as you don't hit them in the head - and getting to be a hero in your own personal fantasy movie is great entertainment, even if the "spells" the wizards and sorcerers are casting are just beanbags being thrown at you.
Still, there's an element of danger to LARPing, especially since it does involve smacking - and getting smacked - by fake weapons. In fact, one time I punched one of my friends squarely in the junk.
It was an accident, of course, but it's an excellent example of what can happen at 3 in the morning at the end of a long LARP weekend. I was keeping an eye out from the "inn," the main building where most of the players slept, to make sure we weren't attacked in the middle of the night by monsters, as the staff of the game loved to mess with players. My character was literally a night watchman, so I usually stayed up pretty late into the night, but this evening I had stowed my gear in the sleeping area that adjoined the inn’s common room.
Wouldn’t you know it but I see some trouble a-brewin’ in the form of three staff members in costume - looking like big, angry looking, shadowy nightmare soldiers - melt out of the darkness and start up the steps to the inn with murderous intent. Naturally I started shouting and ran to get my gear - as my sword and shield were next to my bunk.
I motivated my fat ass through the inn, back into the sleeping area while other players began to mobilize. What I didn't know is that two staff members were lying in wait for the first asshole to come through the door into the sleeping area. I step into the room, cut left to duck into the alcove where my stuff is, and nearly shit myself because suddenly there’s this dude in my face in shadowy nightmare gnoll makeup, cackling and brandishing a pair of swords at me.
*not pictured: two dudes in monster makeup*
I’m literally six inches from him once I realize what’s going on. My mouth drops open, and instead of bellowing “Ambush!” and backpedaling, I give out what can only be categorized as the kind of shrill shriek only a cheerleader could deliver from the backseat of a Volkswagen and nearly tackle the poor guy. Acting purely on instinct, I grab both his weapons – by the blades, mind you – and start bashing him in the face and chest with them, while he’s still holding them. My friend's face crumpled from the mischievous, sadistic grin of a gnoll to a perplexed, slightly terrified man as I’m doing this; his eyes went wide as I continued to abuse him with his own weapons.
This might have continued indefinitely if my friend Ford - also playing a gnoll – had not also been lying in wait from the other side of the door. Perhaps recovering from my sudden entrance and inexplicable assault Ford leaped forward and began raining blows down on my exposed back.
At this point, somewhere deep in my lizard brain, there was a spinning slot machine slowly coming to a stop. On some primal level I realized that I was completely fucked; my gear was behind one giant gnoll, which maybe I could have confused long enough with my antics to grab either my sword or at least my shield, but after the realization formed that I was boxed in by him in front and Ford from behind, I knew I had to get the hell out of there.
This next part is going off what I’ve been told by people who were there. I don’t actually remember anything about the next two seconds, as the next thing I knew I was on the floor back in the common room, crawling for a spare sword someone had stashed there. I only found out after the fight was done what had transpired: after Ford started wailing on me, I cocked my left hand, spun around, punched my friend at full force and squarely in the dick, and then executed a combat dive back into the common room.
*This is Ford. Ford gets punched in the junk a lot.*
After learning from Ford what happened on my way out of the sleeping area, I actually pulled a muscle in my abdomen from laughing so hard. Yes, I felt horrible for cock-punching a man for no good reason whatsoever, but the irony here is I had predicted a nut-shot involving Ford and me several months before that, only with me being the one on the receiving end instead of being the perpetrator of the heinous act.
The absurdity of the scene eventually become legend. Every time Ford told the story later that morning and into the next afternoon, it became more embellished: instead of me giving off a shit-scared little girly shriek and then batting at my one friend like a frightened kitten before bumbling into Ford’s junk on the way back into the common room, I howled like a cornered animal, tried to rip my friend's weapons from his hands in order to physically beat him to death, only turn and (depending on the telling) either Shoryuken or Falcon Punch Ford directly in the dong before diving through the doorway into the common room in slow motion while explosions went off around me like I was in a Michael Bay movie.
This was, of course an important lesson for everyone involved. For me, I never left my gear out of arm's reach again. For everyone else, they learned not to sneak up on me in the middle of the night.
*Your shield: don't leave home without it!*
**Note: some of this content was taken from my blog, [specifically this entry here](https://daviddemar.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/2036/ ), as I recounted it the day after the cock-punching actually happened.**