What is an Indoor Boy?

It’s made up, which might already be obvious. I thought it would be fun to put a phrase together and pretend it’s the brand name for an emerging section of society - like they did with "metrosexual" or "neo-con." These terms went from being jokes to becoming irreplaceable, thanks to the genius of advertisers, and now they are the default descriptors for people and ideals we like to think didn’t exist fifty years ago. (Even though we have to know that King Tut probably had a few metrosexuals wandering around the palace.) I have no far-reaching design for “indoor boy,” no desire to start people saying it after they read this, or to see it spread virally through blogs until it ends up in a real dictionary and eventually Charlie Rose uses it while talking to Henry Kissinger. What I want is to find out if “indoor boy” makes sense to anyone besides me. And for that reason, I will treat it like a fully fledged denomination worthy of Teen Vogue and see what numbers come back.

One spring day in London five years ago, I decided to call my rock band “Eli and the Indoor Boys.” It has taken many years and repeated questioning from others to translate “indoor boy” from a phrase to a philosophy, however thin. Through sheer force I’ve hammered it into a viewpoint and linked it to a small yet potent section of the human condition. Though the term is no longer attached to my band or any consumer product, I still think of indoor boyhood as a way of life, a reminder of some of my more interesting mistakes, a name I still call myself when I want to take my mind off of fate, and a label I stick on certain others when I don’t feel like feeling alone.

Technically, it is a school-age male child who generally keeps out of the sun and is bad at most sports. In a broader sense, and in the one used here, an indoor boy is one of a race of males of any age endowed with an abundance of talent in several artistic fields, yet through a series of catastrophes has failed to reach his public many years on. He is an actor, a writer, a rock musician, a playwright, a poet, a polymath. What should be a rich, fulfilling, lucrative life is instead one spent working in retail and food service, and combing Craigslist to replace the drummers that keep disappearing from his band.

His ultimate goal, as far as he has ever formally stated, is to be an all-around excellent artistic thing—the one-word name for which has yet to be invented or else expired with the ancient Greeks. Having multiple talents is a rare blessing. That’s what people have told him, and that’s what he knows for himself to be true. To eliminate one, or to put one on hold, to be just a brilliant actor, just a great songwriter, to be only a groundbreaking playwright - it would mean shunning rare chances to be one hundred percent alive and present and primed for acceptance into the outdoor world. And this is the goal – to be fully visible to the outdoors. Pursuing all of his divergent talents at the same time may slow his entry into this world, a realm he’s longed to join since first striking out at a T-ball game, but he knows his rewards will come in tidal waves from every direction, drowning him in fulfillment, comfort, and unknown pleasures.

Indoor boys in America often, though not always, share certain core qualities: Northeastern, middle class though way on the lower side, obsessive about bands, picked last for softball. Teased as a child, high grade point average, summa degree from a mediocre college, the patience of a lemming, the self-discipline of a small dog, the people skills of a disgruntled theater critic, and the daily alternating self-esteem of the Elephant Man and Lord Byron. Using what little self-assurance he has gleaned from the praise of English teachers, and later from the kind words of a few one-night stands, the indoor boy in adulthood exerts his energy toward attracting attention from a wide range of arbiters: record labels, casting directors, theater producers, and magazine publishers. He has no formula – just a whole lot of determination. He has no backup plan for employment. If you go to the trouble of having a fallback, you will surely fall back on it. He read that in a book once and it’s the quote he uses most in defense of his continued penury.

With his lesser developed talents he beats back insolvency, identity doubts, and a rapidly approaching sell-by date he knows spells his end. As he breathes the last gasp of his adolescence (years 27 to 29), a few significant events send his broad-scoped mission (all around outstanding artistic thing) into overdrive: the breakup of his beloved rock band (at his own hands, because no one in it cares as much as he does); the abandonment of his rising sketch comedy group (because everyone in it is half-assing rehearsals, and also supremely pissing him off); and then the realization that it’s been five years since he started writing that sprawling screenplay of his (which has traveled in the bottom drawer of a much-moved desk between four different cities and fourteen apartments.)

Confused as to what to do next, and feeling utterly alone, the indoor boy must then hurl himself even deeper into his work - fueled now not by inspiration, but by desperation. He secludes himself in his home for weeks at a time, surrounded by maps and hard drives and pints of ice cream; indoors indefinitely flinging genius at the four walls, until the lack of sun yellows the skin under his eyes, until the intermittent pauses for X-rated internet viewing become too hollow a reward. He explodes onto the sidewalks, friends, lovers, passersby - bursting with equal parts new ideas and ancient grudges and a bag full of flyers for eighteen different kinds of performances. He is an electrifying beast; a creature fully aware of its psychosis and determined to go mad.