This is a story about high school, but it isn’t what you may expect. My high school years were largely free of the issues I had suffered previously, thanks to my rapidly-developing people skills and not a small measure of sociopathy. I had largely “settled in,” one may say, and by Junior year, I knew everybody — and everybody knew me. I was no longer exactly “unpopular,” nor precisely “forgettable” (though I was forgotten on occasion, as I’ll explain later). But I wasn’t being actively abused anymore, which was like a gift of manna from heaven after the hellacious years of my childhood. I was very much an atypical teenager, having my own business and being quite active both inside and outside of classes. The gravitational center of my universe, however, was the high school band.

You see, we had been lucky to have the same director of our band program from seventh grade through Junior year of high school. His last name was “Smedsrud,” but we all called him “Smeds.” He had gone to college in hopes of saving the world by being the best concert trumpetist on the planet, but his embouchure got messed up by a shoddy instructor, and he never quite attained his previous range. So, as the saying goes, “those who can’t do, teach” (which is a shoddy opinion, in my view, but alas does wind up being the case more often than I’d like), and he was, by all accounts, an excellent teacher. Perhaps too good — but we’ll get to that. He had that certain charisma which is part-and-parcel of the toolkit of cult leaders and politicians, and wielded it like a weapon. Every time he opened his mouth to speak, dozens of students would fall quiet and hang onto his every word. His word may as well have been gospel, and we followed him slavishly — with fervor and exuberance.

You don’t usually realize you’re in a cult until you escape from it, and I certainly didn’t realize it in the moment. None of the parents did, either. But a cult it was, and in many ways, I miss being in it. It was comfortable, secure, certain. The shared purpose of its membership was unifying, and for the time we were all in band together, all the bitterness and rivalries of being a high schooler in 21st Century America fell away. We all strove to excellence, because to do otherwise would be disappointing to Smeds, and no one liked to disappoint him. I still remember snapping at our assistant director on one occasion, and Smeds was quite disappointed in me. But I handled the situation well — I did my push-ups, ran my laps, apologized for my youthful impudence, and all was forgiven. In many ways, Smeds was a sort of surrogate parent — he always made me feel safe, even when I was being a pain in the ass (which was uncharacteristically rare). All-in-all, though, there was comfort in the certainty of things, and after everything that had happened in years prior, was quite welcome.

During his tenure, our band swelled from a few dozen students to a couple hundred. A significant portion of the student body was involved in some capacity or another. We had a concert band, a wind ensemble, two jazz bands, a pep band, and a pit orchestra, but everyone wanted to be in the marching band. It should seem odd to anyone who hasn’t done competitive marching band that a bunch of teenagers may choose to spend most (if not all) of their leisure time doing drills, pushups, sit-ups, rehearsals both on-and-off field, leadership seminars, practices, and master classes, but we did — by the dozens. The clarinet section (of which I was part) alone had over 20 members. We punched far above out weight class. Our school wasn’t very large, but we competed with schools much larger. We rarely (if ever) took home anything less than first place in our division, and soon occupied a very large section of the trophy case in the lobby of the school. Everything we did was golden — the parades were lock-step, the field shows were flawless, and everything we accomplished percolated throughout the rest of the school. The student body began to regard the band kids as one of our premier sports teams, and we actually commanded quite a bit of respect from everyone.

To take a moment for a short aside — anyone who thinks that marching band isn’t a physical sport has obviously never attempted the endeavor. To get a taste of what the experience may be like, I invite you to hold a pencil in front of, and parallel to, your body with both hands for twenty minutes (the average length of a field show). Don’t move it, and keep your upper body perfectly still. Look straight ahead. Can you do it? Do your arms ache? Do you feel stiff and rigid? Now imagine doing this while lifting your toes in perfect synchronicity with 150+ other people, dragging your heel along the ground, lowering your toe, turning various directions, twisting your torso — all in lock-step — keeping your upper body completely still. Now, imagine doing all that at a brisk pace, and having to blow massive amounts of precious oxygen through a tube a centimeter or two wide. Now, replace the pencil with an instrument that weighs between 5-35lbs. Now, imagine that instead of doing this for a 20 minute live field show, you’re doing it for two hours, three times a week during rehearsals. Have you changed your mind yet? If not, maybe you will the first time you get bashed in the head with the slide of a trombone from behind.

That all being said, the question remains — how on Earth does one convince a bunch of rowdy teenagers to commit themselves to such a masochistic endeavor? The solution — indoctrination into a way of thinking and being which fosters the sort of fervor the sport demands. Let me explain. The band wasn’t just a band, but a lifestyle. The United States has, for at least half a century, had this philosophical undercurrent to music education. Band class isn’t just about music, performance, and art — though it is all those things too — it’s also seen as a platform for training the next generation of leaders and community figureheads. Enter Dr. Tim.

Dr. Tim Lautzenheiser has been writing band instructional manuals, doing leadership trainings for band students, and generally trying to improve the world since at least the 1980s. Half of the band students in the United States have performed exercises out of his “Essential Elements” series, designed for introducing the fundamentals of concert instruments to middle-schoolers. He’s taught leadership workshops to well over two million students, and tries to convey simple lessons about how to lead and perform at a very high level. Essentially, his leadership philosophy boils down to this — flush toilets.

This concept needs some unpacking. Imagine, for a moment, that you are in a public restroom. Upon entering, your nose encounters a foul odor emanating from a stall some feet away. The door is ajar, but it’s clear that someone has recently released the contents of their bowels therein. It’s an unpleasant experience to smell it, but upon passing by and taking a peek in (out of morbid curiosity, of course), you become witness to what any reasonable human being may call the greatest crime ever committed against a porcelain throne in the entire history of our species. The size of the defecation defies even the most imaginative minds, and your eyes begin to burn at the sight. The experience, as a whole, is quite unpleasant. You quickly turn and jolt into another stall, use the facilities, and depart post haste (after washing one’s hands, of course). What have you just done?

Why, you have just burdened another human being to suffer the same wretched fate that you had suffered through! Another person will enter the restroom, smell the foul stench, see the atrocity in the pot, choose another stall, rush through their business, wash their hands, and leave yet another poor soul to this fate. On, and on, and on it goes, and by regular application of utilitarian calculus, the small convenience the perpetrator of the original crime gained by not flushing the damn toilet has now, through collective inaction, caused massive downside utility loss for dozens of others. But here’s the Good News(TM) — there is an easy solution to this collective action problem — flush the damn toilet. Yes, it is true that it isn’t your mess. Yes, it is also true that the perpetrator is less virtuous ‘cause of their laziness and sloth. Yes, it’s mildly unpleasant to relegate oneself to actually entering the stall and interacting with the crime committed therein. And yes — there may be no one in the bathroom to see you do your good deed. Yet do it you must. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do, and because it helps to save others from the unpleasantness which you encountered therein. You should expect no award, no glory, no praise or accolade, but you will know you made a difference. And should you decide not to, you’ll now know that, too.

Now that I have inconvenienced you for the remainder of your days on this Earth, let’s extrapolate this concept and inconvenience you some more. Imagine that we’re talking about more than toilets. Let’s say a friend of yours, whom you’re working on some sort of project with in a group, is having a bad day. Their beloved pet hamster died last night, and they’ve been up all night sobbing and wailing, bemoaning their beloved and dearly departed Bartholemew Hamsterface III. They’re too tired to complete their part of the task at hand today, and the remainder of the group is left in the position of picking up the slack. The other members of your group refuse to do so, citing the unfairness which would result from doing so. You could draw a boundary and refuse, of course, but this is a group project, and if it doesn’t get done, you all will be equally blamed for the failure. Faced with this reality, where you can tell them to shove it or otherwise do the work yourself, you do the work yourself. Does it result in the unjust enrichment of your supposed partners? Sure. But if you hadn’t done the work, you would have faced consequences, as would they all. By holding your metaphorical nose and flushing the metaphorical toilet, you save everyone from failure. That — according to Dr. Tim, Smeds, and millions of kids raised to believe in this philosophy — is leadership in a nutshell.

We had this philosophy drilled into us every single day — during zero hour jazz band at 6AM, during wind ensemble at 7AM, after school at marching band rehearsal, on the weekends at marching band rehearsal, during football and basketball games when we played in the pep band, and of course — during band camp. Those summer band camps were week-long cauldrons of highly structured activity. We’d show up every morning at 8AM, ready to play. We’d do morning exercises in the field, then warm-up basic drills at 9AM, we’d head inside and practice playing with the whole band at 10AM, do short sectionals at 11AM, break for lunch at noon, do another round of basics at 12:30PM, followed by two and a half hours of field show practice and memorization which ended around 3:00PM. After that, we’d get a final pep talk for the day, and shuffle off around 3:30PM. This would go on for seven days straight toward the end of summer break. As if that weren’t enough, we had sectional rehearsals throughout the summer, usually twice a week for an hour or so. And if you were going to be a section leader, you were also expected to sign up for the summer band leadership camp held during the beginning of the summer in Oregon.

That leadership camp was intense. Students from all over the region would attend. One week without parents around, working with talented music educators from all over the place, doing all the things we did in our own schools’ band camps, but not going home at 3PM. No, we would continue playing music, doing drum circles, and doing leadership trainings until around midnight each day, only to wake up at 6AM to do it all over again. And we loved it. This should have been the point where I realized I had fallen into some sort of strange cult, but I was all-in, having bought into the communitarian leadership philosophy which I was taught. I would wake up each morning eager to please, working from dawn to well-past dusk to bond with our fellow students and to make our instructors proud. We weren’t just flushing toilets, we were living the lifestyle fully and earnestly, each person looking out for everyone else, and driving one another to work even harder — to do just five more morning push-ups, one more lap around the field, to miss one fewer note, and to polish our performance to pristine perfection. By the end of the week, we had learned an entire field show to perform for our parents on the final day — something that took all summer to do with our school bands. We were the elite vanguard of marching band students, and we left that camp believing we could do anything … but that, of course, did not turn out to be the case.

On the long van ride home, myself and a few others were sitting and chatting (loudly), exuberant after the accomplishments of the past week. This was an era before everyone had a phone to stare at all damn day, and back then we would fill our time with idle chit-chat among our fellow human beings. I doubt you’ll ever get to experience that, and hell — you may not even be chatting with humans on the phone, either. AI may have taken over by then, but that’s a worry for another chapter. As we were passing through Yakima, one of us remembered out of the blue that the final Harry Potter book had just been released a day or two before. We had all sort of forgotten, given the constant drumbeat of activity at camp. This was well before J.K. Rowling had revealed herself as problematic, and for all of us, Harry Potter was what we had grown up reading. It was a shared childhood cultural experience, and we did not want to suffer any spoilers by falling behind the pack. We convinced Papa and Oma to pull over at the Border’s bookstore in Yakima, and each obtained a copy. The remainder of the trip consisted of eerie silence, which to you is probably the norm.

A couple of weeks later, Oma, Papa, and I went on a vacation to Hawaii. It was the only time I’d ever been, and I was excited to see the sights, go snorkeling, and surf a little. The first stop on our tour was the U.S.S. Arizona, still laying in her final resting place, exactly where she was sunk by Japanese bombers in the first day of the Pacific Theater. It was intended to be a solemn event, but for me, it carried uncommon weight. I was informed by your grandparents just before we went out to the memorial that Smeds, our beloved band director, had taken a job at another school across the state, and that we’d have a new director for our senior year.

Now, what I’m about to describe may sound pathetic (and it is), but Smeds had been the only stable daily adult presence in my life aside from my stepfather. Your Oma was always a tad… eccentric, and while she could be fun at parties, she is not an easy person to live with. So to have that stable presence abruptly removed was… difficult. I recall struggling not to cry at the memorial, but was heartened that — given the setting— should I fail in my endeavor, it would at least seem appropriate to onlookers. In addition to the grief I endured, my thoughts were preoccupied with concerns about what would happen to the band. Smeds had been the heart and soul of the organization, and his charisma was what got nearly 150 teenagers to stop fighting and start cooperating in pursuit of a greater goal. That being said, I was still feeling the afterglow of that leadership camp, and still believed I could do anything with the help of my bandmates.

The remainder of the trip was uneventful — at least to me. Aside from making the rare achievement of catching a wave, standing up, and surfing into shore on my own after just thirty minutes of training (I was actually in excellent shape at this point in my life, as you may imagine), my thoughts were increasingly anxious and my worries seemed inescapable. I did acquire a ukulele which you plucked at many years later, sitting on my lap when you were two.

When summer ended a couple of weeks later, we were introduced to our new director. He was well-meaning, but this would be his first high school teaching gig, and he had not been raised in the same leadership model. He wasn’t from the area, and hadn’t been caught up in the multi-generational pipeline of band students stretching from Mark Lane through the kids learning under some of my former bandmates today. It turns out that religious fervor is inherited, and this man was from a very different kind of faith. It took us a while to teach him the concept of flushing toilets, and to be honest, I think he believed we were all a bit daft.

The predictable consequence of all this was that our band lost about half of its members. My section was particularly hard-hit, dwindling from 21 members to eight. We even lost my co-section leader who went to leadership camp with us. It was a disaster. Our field show wasn’t designed for this number of players, and we had holes in our formations all over the place. To compound matters, we had voluntarily entered into competitions at a division higher than the size of our school would suggest, simply because we had such a high percentage of the student body in the band, and because we had been dominating the lower division for many years. Competing in a higher division would have been a fun challenge before, but now it was a slaughter. Our drum majors did the best they could to hold everyone together, but even they became dispirited after a time.

At the end of the year, the band carried on a tradition of roasting the exiting seniors at a party held in our honor. Everyone had a skit planned out for them, and got their moment of applause. I was the only one whom they had forgotten to write a sketch for; so someone had to improvise. Again, I found myself suppressing tears, repeating a mantra I had developed years before while locked in a broom closet — “It’s better to be angry than sad. It’s better to be angry than sad…”

I enrolled at Central Washington University after graduating high school, and took up a music education major, as had been the plan for years. I arrived at the same time Mark Lane, Smeds’s old band director, joined the faculty. It should have been an honor to play in his band. But I rapidly discovered that the magic was gone, and that I didn’t actually enjoy playing nearly as much as I thought I did. I had become jilted, and more than a little callous. I had no idea what to do with my life, and in a fit of desperation (and with a horrific GPA) dropped the major Spring quarter. I took up philosophy instead, which is the topic of another chapter. I kept flushing toilets for many years, until entering therapy and realizing I had been taken some advantage of.