That’s my son Lucas, minutes before his first-ever paintball war. He’s been talking about paintball for at least three years, and finally, today, he got to go. This was his present for his 13th birthday. I drove him, his brother, and two friends over to a paintball field on the far side of Lafayette. I didn’t suit up and play with them because my back and my neck still ache from the car wreck last month, and they’re too shaky to risk re-injuring. I wore a mask to watch the first couple of rounds of paintball war, but eventually left to go sit at a picnic table near the shack and read. View from my table:

I am fully aware of how ridiculous it is to sit at the edge of a cold, wet, windy paintball field and read about mimetic rivalry. I can’t help it, I was born that way.

Below, an image that everybody from south Louisiana knows. It’s a crawfish tower, built by the crawfish from the mud he excavated in digging his burrow. He’s living in the hole below the thing. This short video clip captures a crawfish building his tower at night (they’re nocturnal). Here’s a photo from the paintball field today: