Fight Apathy, or Don't

Indoorsman

Tell me what’s so great about going outside. Seriously. Fresh air? Nature? Animals?

Bullshit.

As I’m writing this right now, I just heard Julia scream, “Ah, there’s a spider on me!” from outside. Jen made them go outside and paint pumpkins. Now it’s quiet in here.

Anyway, what was I saying? Right, outside. It sucks out there. I sympathize with my kids when it comes to that, and I sympathize with every kid when it comes to the outdoors. Every kid has heard it.

“Get outside, it’s a beautiful day!”

I hate to break it to the young ones, and you parents will never admit it out loud, but we all know why that phrase exists. It’s so us parents can have some alone time. Listen, I’ll use every possible excuse to get the kids to occupy themselves so I can try and sneak in 15 minutes of getting laid, but that one I refuse to use.

I get it. The outdoors suck, and I’m not forcing it on anyone, especially my kids. For starters, the outdoors doesn’t have computers, television, or even power, for that matter. If you were outdoors, you couldn’t read this. And being outdoors, you run the risk of having an Air Conditioner that I didn’t properly install, fall on your head and kill you. While you’re outside your wife may notice that, yes, those hedges probably do need trimming. Going outside, you may realize that your house needs painting, or stuff needs to be put away.

I’m an Indoorsman.

Being indoors, in my mind, is the most wonderful place to be. It’s magical, when you think about it. There’s protection from the elements. There’s electricity. There’s entertainment. There are places to lie down. There are things to keep our food cold, and our meals hot. There’s Super Mario Galaxy. For those of you who appreciate the outdoors, they’ve invented these amazing things called windows, where you can appreciate the outdoors from the comfort of the indoors. It’s amazing in here. Even if you’re indoors with people you don’t want to be around, you can move to another room, and you won’t even know you’re in the same indoors with those people. You won’t find any of those wonderful things outdoors. It’s just a big goddamn open space. Ever been to an outdoor party? There’s nowhere to hide, or to lie down.

My outdoor hatred goes way back.

The first job I ever had was an outdoor job. My grandfather had gotten me this gig through a friend of his. This guy was an old, wealthy hump who owned a carpet installation company, so naturally, the dude had money, and owned an enormous house on a huge piece of property. My job, for $20 a weekend, was to “prepare” the grounds before the actual landscapers, and grass cutters came in. Basically, I had to walk the grounds, and collect pinecones, and any other debris that would fuck up the tractor they used to cut the grass. I was also in charge of making sure that none of the hundreds of plants were suffering from dehydration, and to turn over the mulch so it looked “fresh”. The last part of the job was using the push mower to cut the grass in the places that the tractor couldn’t reach. The entire process usually took me about 8 hours.

The only advantage to this job, was that I figured out a way to bring the indoors to the outdoors. At the time, I had a Sony Walkman, so I could listen to cassettes while I was doing all this mundane shit outside. I’d spend most of the day planning in my head what songs to put on the tape for next weeks round of picking up pinecones. I was eventually fired from that job, thankfully. One week I found an enormous anthill behind one of the garages. When I asked the owner how he wanted me to handle it, he told me to take some of the “gaz” from the garage and burn it up. Apparently, old Dr. Carpet didn’t have any kids, because the last thing you want to do is tell a 12 year old kid to pour gasoline on an anthill and light it up, but that’s what I did, and that was my last day. Not only did I burn out the colony of insects, but I took out half of Swansea at the same time.

Around the same time, my parents decided it was a good idea for me to join Boy Scouts. The first thing that came to my mind was, “Awesome, more outside time.” Boy Scouts meant that I was going to have to now spend more time outside, with people that weren’t from my town, and it doesn’t seem like anyone wants to talk about Green Lantern, these kids are hardcore into this stuff.

Weekly meetings went like this: We spent 15 minutes going over merit badges that we were working on (me: none), and reciting some oaths and poems. After that, they’d send the lot of us outside to play manhunt in the pitch black. Manhunt is basically hide-and-seek, but when you catch someone, you get to beat the fuck out of them. One of the first times I played, I stood on top of a bulkhead, and crouched there, trying not to be seen, when the bulkhead (which I later found out was rotted plywood), gave out, and I fell 8 feet down into the basement and blacked out. When I came to, I had a 20 inch cut up my leg from a rusty nail that tore my leg wide open.

The Boys Scout motto is Be Prepared, but it should be Be Prepared to Hate This Shit.

Camping was even worse. Camping meant that you were going to spend more time outside, probably working. There was this campout called the “CranBerrie”. Doesn’t that sound fun? Do you know what it is? It’s a weekend outside where you pick cranberries for free, sleep outside and earn a cranberry merit badge.

One time we went on a surprise hike up in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. For those who don’t know, a hike is a long walk, outside, where you carry all your shit on your back, and not something you want to surprise someone with. The entire hike took three days, and at the end of it, I was unbelievably pissed off at not only my parents, who knew of the surprise, but also at the scoutmaster who thought this would be a great learning experience. To show us how proud they were of all of us, they took us to a Pizza Hut at the bottom of the mountain, and treated the entire troop to the buffet. Because I thought I was going on an actual camping trip, I brought $10 with me, in the event that I needed to buy something, but like I said, I had no idea we were going to be completely severed from civilization. I exacted my revenge on those bastards by putting that $10 bill into the jukebox, and playing Kokomo by the Beach Boys 40 times. They all hated me by the time we left. Even now, when I hear the first notes of that song, right before I change the station, I think of the collective “UGH!” that followed it in that Pizza Hut.

Summer camp was the worst of all. This was where you got to spend a week outside, in a 20-year-old tent that wouldn’t protect you from anything, where the food was shitty, and you sang gay songs about how happy you were to be there, and how nice it was outside. The only thing I wanted to do at any of these camps was swim. Was there a pool? A Lake? Good, then leave me alone. Each year at those stupid summer camps, I’d only get 1 badge, and I’d usually get the same one 7 or 8 times. I think I probably just wanted to drown, so it would scare my parents into ever letting me back.

But alas, nothing stopped them from sending me to camp. Even when one of the scoutmasters was arrested for giving one of the kids in my troop a bunch of acid and molesting him over a 5-year period, the response was, “Did he touch you? No? Good, pack your footlocker you’re going to Camp Cachalot.”

I’ve already gone on and on about the sports I was forced to endure, so I’ll just say that didn’t add to my hatred of fresh air.

I drove with a friend of mine cross country from Providence to Denver, and back again. Do you know how many times I got out of the car to appreciate this great nation of ours? Once. One time, and that was only when we finally arrived. All of the photos I took were from the comfort of his Blazer.

As a kid, there was one place I was truly happy, and my mother can attest to this. It was indoors in front of the computer. She’d serve me meals there while I sat there playing King’s Quest, or Montezuma’s Revenge. When we’d visit Uncle Jim, I’d make a b-line right for his computer room, because he always had the coolest games in 1987. On a trip to family friends, I spent the entire extended weekend playing an Olympics game.

Indoorsmen like myself sometimes get branded with the term nerd, or geek. I’m fine with that. History has shown that we eventually come out on top.

One time in high school, I had a party at my house, while my parents were away. If I had to guess this was probably either 1989 or 1990. In any event, I wasn’t that popular, but I think there was beer there, and there were a few people in attendance. There was one broad who I really wanted to impress, cause she was kind of hot. Me being the player that I was, I finally got the nerve up to talk to her, and the first thing out of my mouth was, “Hey wanna see something cool?”

“Sure”, she said, and I proceeded to boot up my PC in the family room. “What is it?”

“Well, I can connect over the phone line to my buddy Eric and we can type back and forth to each other.”

“Wow”, she said, “That’s cool.”

After about 20 minutes of configuring telex to not dial the Troy City BBS, and to dial directly to Eric’s house, I finally got it to work, but by that point she had become disinterested in what I thought was cool, and she never got to see cutting-edge interactive technology that was happening in my parents house. This was literally just like War Games, and she was missing out on it. Great job, nerd, stay inside.

Doesn’t matter, anyway. Eventually I married her.

The moral of the story? Stay inside, you’ll eventually get the girl.