JOHN LAROCHE
I'll tell you a story. I once fell deeply, profoundly in love with tropical fish. I had sixty goddamn fish tanks in my house. I'd skin-dive to find just the right ones. Anisotremus virginicus, Holacanthus ciliaris, Chaetodon capistratus. You name it. Then one day I say, "Fuck fish!", I renounce fish.I vow to never set foot in the ocean again, that's how much fuck fish. That was seventeen years ago and I have never since stuck so much as a toe into that ocean. And I love the ocean!

SUSAN ORLEAN
(beat)
But why?

LAROCHE
(shrugs)
Done with fish.
- Adaptation by Charlie Kaufman.

I was once a good trumpet player. When I was a sophomore and junior I retained second chair despite numerous attempts to wrest it out of my hands (or is that wrest my ass out of the chair?). I was even awarded second chair in jazz band and if you know much about high school jazz bands, second chair receives most of the solos. I had a private instructor who taught me for free because he believed I had some talent and I attended jazz camp to learn how to improvise; I simply loved playing the trumpet.

My senior year begin the decline in my efforts at mastering the trumpet. My mother took a church in a new town which meant I'd have to switch schools for my last year of high school. I really didn't want to join the band at this high school because I hated, absolutely hated, marching band, the only thing high school bands do for the first 3 months. I didn't want to give up playing trumpet and had empty hopes of finding a community jazz band to play in but I realized as the first day of school approached that this was indeed and empty hope and, if I wanted to continue playing, I had to join the band.

The instructor wasn't horrible but all band directors border on the horrible. He had some odd plan to create a "super-band" in three years by giving the freshman and sophomores the higher chairs and the juniors and seniors the lower. I went from playing first trumpet music to third trumpet music; needless to say this was ridiculously boring. I still managed to have the second chair in jazz band so I dealt with all the bullshit that came with marching band and concert band.
Heading off to Olivet I wanted to countinue honing my musical abilities and considered a minor in Music in addition to my Religion/Philosophy major. I enrolled to take private trumpet lessons with the trumpet professor and at first I was rather promising, that is until the reality of school work began to set in. Music demands a certain amount of your time, a certain piety if you will and the study of philosophy and religion requires the same. I found myself reading more and practicing trumpet less. Music and philosophy became competing disciplines in my life and I knew that one was going to suffer if I tried to pursue both. I didn't want to be a mediocre musician but I was becoming one. I could tell that academia proper was beginning to matter more to me than music theory ever could and so one day I simply left my trumpet in Larsen Fine Arts Center, in a practice room, and never looked back. My professor even called after he found it and I never went to collect it; that was two years ago. I saw him a year later at Chicago Dough and he told me he was still holding it for me; I was ashamed but I didn't go get it. Then he called me again just six months ago to tell me he was leaving Olivet and left it with the secretary for me and still I didn't go get it.

Tommorow I am going to go get it, either out of a certain sense of responsibility to the sacrifice my mother made to buy it for me or out of a profane desire to still play music even though I know I will never be as good as I want to be. It may be that the trumpet is gone and if so I really think I will feel a certain sadness, but not the sadness that comes when you lose something but the sadness you feel when you kill a part of yourself.