Jeff Barbeau’s First Photo Essay.

Jeff Barbeau said “I thought maybe it could appear like this: photo, then essay.” Behold.

1. The Oxford English Dictionary defines community as ‘a cold cement room with a small window.’ Ordinarily, I am not a big fan of community because I often think that community is a codeword for pot-luck. On a good night I eat peanut butter off a spoon and half a grapefruit. This does not make for community. What this makes for is: a good personality.

2. One thing I do enjoy is sharing a practice space with False Face and the Bring Homes. In this one small way I feel like I am contributing to something larger than myself. Something larger and colder and more expensive than myself. What’s more, Paul often brings chips.

3. When someone brings up the issue of solipsism I say to myself that this conversation is over and that I should have some peanut butter on a spoon. If somebody had not stolen the Wittgenstein I put in the Goat library in 2004 I would have more to say on this issue. Suffice to say, you are never alone so long as you have a band and a car and a space heater and some egg cartons. I should never have put that Wittgenstein in the Goat library. Nevertheless, it is nice to be in a small cold room with your friends, their instruments, some other broken instruments, and if Paul has his way a flaming oil drum. I look forward to warming my hands with him over this egregious fire hazard.

4. Yesterday, a nice man came from downstairs to bring us earplugs, and when we put these earplugs in I looked at Ben and my eyes said to Ben: ‘was that dude your dad?’ And his eyes said ‘no.’ I accidentally ran those earplugs through the wash at the laundromat this morning and I thought to myself, I am going to lock myself in that washroom and never come out. It was pretty clean.

5. But our practice space is a wonderful place and I particularly like that we are now doing experiments to see how close we can come to zero degrees kelvin. On the bright side, I have not aged in six months.

6. Do you remember Lee Iacocca? He always makes my mouth water because his last name sounds like tapioca, a delicious thickening agent. Well, that intolerable blowhard Lee Iacocca said: ‘The ability to concentrate and to use your time well is everything if you want to succeed in business, or almost anywhere else for that matter.’ I think we can all agree that Lee Iacocca should be prevented from writing any more books. I may not have been the Chief Executive Officer of Chrysler (although I was the majority stockholder in Saturn from 1985 to 1989), but trying hard is just common sense. You are not fooling anyone Lee Iacocca, you just mailed that one in.

7. In conclusion, I encourage everyone to get their own practice space and not come to ours.