We've All Been Lied To By the Cereal Box ©2026 John F Sendelbach

Start with the box, since it's honest about being a box. You were a kid, so it was the best thing in the store. The whole aisle was lit up with them — Tony the Tiger mid-roar, the Trix rabbit getting swindled again, Cap'n Crunch, Count Chocula and Frankenberry and the sad little Boo Berry ghost, Toucan Sam telling you to follow his nose. Every one of them engineered down to the molecule to reach a four-year-old at eye level. There was a prize in there — a plastic nothing you'd tear the bag apart to reach before the cereal even got poured. There was a maze on the back and a cartoon you'd read forty mornings running. And there was the smell when you opened it, that first sweet chemical rush off the top of the bag that no adult food has ever once produced. Your mother did not want you looking at that box, and she was right, because the box was built to bypass her entirely and go straight for you. And it was three-quarters air.

Five & Seven Little Words (You Are What Ewe Eat) ©2026 John F. Sendelbach

Five & Seven Little Words (You Are What Ewe Eat)
©2026 John F. Sendelbach

You are what Ewe eat, so eat
(so eat…)
You are what Ewe eat, so eat
(so eat…) 

They’ve been saying it for two hundred years.
A Frenchman said it first, back in 1826—
tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.
A German took it further: man is what he eats.
But the oldest version is a prayer.
Give us this day our daily bread. 

Five and seven little words you’ve heard your whole life…
and underneath them, a question. 

Dear Randi Weingarten: THE CHILD STILL HAS TO READ THE PARAGRAPH

I never thought of myself as a writer. The word used to call up someone alone with a cigarette burning down beside a legal pad, assembling sentences out of private weather, and I trusted myself to be that person exactly never. I have come to understand that I work the other way around. I begin with a disturbance rather than a sentence—an image, a contradiction, a piece of civic machinery making a noise it plainly should not be making—and I follow it until it tells me what it is. AI has become part of how I do the following: I use it the way a person might use a backhoe on a buried foundation, to dig and retrieve and test and arrange, to haul up the record and lay it out where I can see the whole shape at once. The machine can help move the words around. What it cannot do is supply the obsession that got me out of bed, decide what is worth noticing in the first place, or stand behind the result when someone disagrees. Those parts stay mine, and they are the parts that matter.

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Randi Weingarten can fight Target over immigration politics. The crisis is still sitting in America's classrooms, staring at a page of text and seeing fog.

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There are images that capture an age more cleanly than any white paper, commission report, or emergency summit full of people in name badges explaining why the emergency is more complicated than it looks, and this is one of them: a teachers' union leader, in the season of backpacks and No. 2 pencils, training her political artillery on Target because the retailer failed to deliver the correct public sermon about immigration enforcement in Minnesota. That is the picture worth sitting with, because of everything it is not. It is not a national campaign on childhood literacy, not a demand that every district put a trained reading specialist within reach of every child who cannot decode a paragraph, not a public accounting of the Zoom years, not even a plain admission that a horrifying number of children are moving through American schools unable to read at the level their age is supposed to guarantee. In a season that belongs, if it belongs to anything, to the machinery of getting children ready to learn, the barricade went up outside Target.

BURNING MAN The Ash Economy: A New England maker follows the fuel ©2026 John F Sendelbach

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I have no stake in Burning Man. I'm a Massachusetts metalworker — steel, stone, salvage — and I build things meant to stay in the ground after I'm gone. I would never go to the Black Rock Desert, and I'll say it plainly: I think the event is an abomination. Nevada is about as far from my shop as the lower forty-eight allows. I had no reason to think about any of this.

Then the gnome showed up in my local news.

The Unattended Loop: On History, Harm, and the Only Signal That Enters

Feed a photograph back into the machine that made it. Take the output, feed that in too. Do it again. Do it a few hundred times. You already know what happens, because you've seen it, and it unsettled you more than it should have. The picture doesn't hold. It doesn't stay itself and it doesn't drift toward something cleaner or brighter. It rots. Faces slide toward the grotesque. Eyes multiply or migrate. Colors bruise. Whatever the original scene was — a kitchen, a field, a person you loved — a few hundred iterations in, it's gone, and what's left is a thing that looks like it was dreamed by something with a fever. Not random. That's the part that gets under your skin. It doesn't decay toward noise, toward gray static, toward nothing. It decays toward a specific kind of wrongness. It gets worse in a direction.

There's a boring technical account of why, and it's true, and I'll give it to you because the boring truth is load-bearing. Each pass, the machine does two things. It loses a little real information — detail, nuance, the actual signal of the actual scene. And it slightly amplifies its own most confident guesses: its priors, the patterns it already leaned toward before you ever showed it anything. Repeat that loop with nothing new coming in, and the losses compound and the priors swell, until you're no longer looking at the photograph at all. You're looking at the machine's biases, fed back through themselves, with the world subtracted out. It's an echo made of one voice, getting surer of itself and emptier at the same time.

People look at those pictures and say: see, the machine tends toward our demise. That reads a technical artifact as prophecy. The honest lesson is narrower, and it travels farther. Any system that only listens to itself degrades. It amplifies its own bias. It starts to look like fate. Now hold that image in your head and look at human history.

The Myth of the Patriarchy

How Massachusetts’ Progressive Managerial Class Inherited the Horticultural Blueprint of the Invisible Empire, Weaponized the Myth of the Patriarchy, and Engineered the Shelburne Falls Star Chamber

John F. Sendelbach · Sculptor · Shelburne Falls · 2026

This paper exists because the local script still needs a male-dominated sky to explain a female-credentialed weather system, and that script is a cover. For most of recorded state history, public office, law, property, and coercive authority were predominantly controlled by men. That is not a myth, and the existence of queens, regents, or matrilineal systems does not erase the larger pattern. What changed sharply after the middle of the twentieth century was credential access, not the arrival of a matriarchy. Women entered schools, professions, boards, parties, nonprofits, newsrooms, and the official language of care. A few visible women in Massachusetts offices is not the same claim as "women run the Commonwealth." Power is not a male vice and a female virtue. People who get a durable grip on a committee, newsroom, badge, hiring list, or public narrative tend to protect their position and their caption. They call the protection safety, community, care, healing, or experience. Men did that with a male vocabulary. The rooms I lived through did it with different words and the same habits: petition, plaque, letter, silence. The initiating layer was heavily female. The stamps beneath it were still often male. I will not flatten that into "the police were women," and I will not pretend the caption was weather. Corruption tracks opportunity, opacity, and loyalty more reliably than chromosomes. Each public accusation is its own file. Smoke is not a method. I have watched atmosphere turn into a verdict before a record was read, and I will not reproduce that method simply because the names on the door have changed. When people who speak most loudly about dismantling unaccountable power skip the interview, leave the characterization standing, and call the silence healing, they are using the tool they said they came to break. Women are not better. Men were not a unique disease. The general proposition is smaller and harder: human beings with unexamined power protect the story that keeps them in power. That is why this record starts with paper instead of a sermon. 

TEMPORARILY ELSEWHERE

Are All Cops Bastards? ©2026 John F Sendelbach

DISAPPEARING SMOKE

Disappearing Smoke is about the small Orchard Park creek I grew up on and the layered history the water carries. It's named for the Seneca leader the English called Old Smoke — Sayenqueraghta, of the Turtle Clan, whose name translates as disappearing smoke and who died on the creek in 1786 — and the song's argument is that he didn't really disappear: the name outlived the man, the water outlived the name, and the land keeps the record even when the people on it have forgotten how to read it. From that hinge it moves down through the creek's layers — the Seneca homeland and its dispossession by treaty and pressure (never a neutral "giving up" of land), the Quaker settlement with its meetinghouse, its library that lent to women first, and its abolitionist conscience, the freedom seekers who moved north toward the Canadian border through this corridor, and the later regional tradition of craft and reform. It refuses to romanticize any of it or invent detail the record can't support, holding oral tradition honestly as tradition. And it turns, finally, on obligation: the creek is a living place, not a museum, so the real question isn't only what happened on its banks but what you owe the ground once you know what it carried — acknowledge the sovereignty, acknowledge the loss, honor the courage, and don't gild it. Disappearing smoke, but it never really goes.

MENAGERIE ~ autobiography song ©2026 John F Sendelbach

The Rarity and Extensibility of Care: Evolutionary Roots, Human Expansion, and the Structures of Indifference JFS 2026

The Rarity and Extensibility of Care

Evolutionary Roots, Human Expansion, and the Structures of Indifference

An Interdisciplinary Inquiry into Parental Investment, Empathy, Culture, Development, and Moral Refusal

Executive Note ~ JFS 2026 ~ Care is a costly and conditional capacity with roots in parental investment, attachment, social bonding, and cooperation. Humans extend it beyond kin and immediate experience—to strangers, future generations, landscapes, institutions, historical memory, and abstract ideals—while retaining powerful capacities for selective refusal, indifference, and moral disengagement. This paper examines how care emerges, how it expands, why it fails, and what developmental, cultural, and institutional conditions make it more durable.

JFS bio w/ song

John F. Sendelbach ~ Shelburne Falls, MA

I couldn't spell menagerie in the sixth grade. It's the word that knocked me out of the spelling bee. I learned to spell it that day — but it took me about fifty years to build one. I didn't know that's what I was doing. Nobody does, at the time. You just make the next thing that's alive in front of you, and if you're the same person your whole life, the things pile up into a shape you can't see until you turn around. I've turned around. Here's the shape. It starts on a beach in the Adirondacks, up at the north end of Piseco Lake, where we vacationed. I'm about ten, and I build a turtle out of wet sand and rake rings into the beach around it. I didn't know then that I was siting a sculpture in its setting, or that a Zen garden in Kyoto had been doing the same thing with raked gravel for five hundred years — I'd learn that much later, in grad school, and love it, and recognize it, because I'd already done it as a kid. That's the whole story in one move: I keep walking into rooms that turn out to be furnished with my own furniture.

WONDERBUNS (LEANER TRADING PAPER)

WONDERBUNS (LEANER TRADING PAPER) ©2026 John F Sendelbach

LET'S GO QUAKERS!

Second of the four, and the only girl they had  

Three brothers and a quiet house and a little-deaf old dad  

A grandmother with the hearing aids, the silence in the walls—  

And a girl who learned to raise a noise above it all

On a Quaker field in autumn she would spell the good news loud  

The plainest, quietest people, and she cheered ’em to the crowd  

Q-U-A-K-E-R-S, she’d throw it to the sky—  

A loud girl for the silent folk, and nobody knew why

THE REVERSE MACHINE Finding the Mind by Letting It Mutate: Discovery, Selection, Preservation, and the Ethics of Revisability

The story does not begin at the beginning. It starts with the wreckage: a bent fork, a blown-out photograph, a phrase stuck in the throat, an old song dragged into a new room by musicians who were not even alive when it was written. This is the reverse machine—an engine built from leftovers, running backward through time with sparks in its teeth. You find a surviving signal in the debris: a melody, a shape, a scrap of steel, a fact, a question that will not quit. Then you pull on it. What was this before it got here? Who carried it? What got lost in transit? What was added by accident, hunger, fear, bad lighting, bad memory, or the desperate need to make a pattern out of the weather? The world is full of hard, indifferent material—photos, tools, bodies, records, light—but nobody gets the whole picture. We grab details and turn them into stories, sculptures, decisions, private religions, or bad late-night theories. A warm flare in an old photograph can become a whole new work, sure, but it is not a telegram from God just because it hit you at the right hour. The mind is a wild pattern-eating animal: once something gets under its skin, it sees that thing everywhere, stacking coincidences like poker chips and calling the pile destiny. Memory is no clean vault either; every time you open it, you put your hands on the evidence. So look hard, then look again. Let other people tell you what you missed. Check the facts when facts are on the line. Keep the signal, but don’t worship the static. ~ JFS  (longer monologue follows the paper...all the way down ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓)

THE REVERSE MACHINE

Finding the Mind by Letting It Mutate

Discovery, Selection, Preservation, and the Ethics of Revisability

John F. Sendelbach August 2026

Abstract

The Reverse Machine proposes a disciplined account of how a person can encounter, select, interpret, and transform patterns without mistaking artistic or personal significance for verified fact. Its central claim is limited: the world contains structures, constraints, relations, and affordances that no individual observer invents. Yet the strength of a discovery claim varies by domain. Mathematics offers the strongest candidate for mind-independent necessity; music, art, and material practice involve real constraints intertwined with historical construction; personal life offers evidence and recurrence but requires the greatest interpretive humility.

The essay develops a four-stage grammar: presence → selection → interpretation → transformation. A difference may be present before attention notices it; selection foregrounds it; interpretation assigns it a role; transformation carries that role into theory, action, song, sculpture, or shared culture. Selection is indispensable, but it is not proof. The reverse machine is therefore not a device for extracting hidden truths. It is a recursive practice through which objects, photographs, memories, archives, musical forms, and machine-generated hypotheses are brought into relation, challenged, transformed, and tested.

Generative AI appears here as expanded hypothesis bandwidth rather than epistemic authority. It can help compare, reframe, and articulate possibilities, but it can also amplify false synthesis, confirmation loops, and persuasive nonsense. The essay proposes a four-part filter—calibration, function, care, and revisability—to distinguish a meaningful connection from a claim that has earned stronger provisional status.

A case study follows an archival photograph of metal insects, a machine-mediated noticing of one apparently golden head, the song Bach Bug, and fifty pairs of unfinished fork-tine legs awaiting new sculptural form. The argument does not seek to eliminate uncertainty. It seeks to keep uncertainty productive: to make transformation accountable, preserve enough signal for continuity, and leave every map open to correction.

FISHBIKE (Albert’s Lightning Drops) ©2026 John F. Sendelbach

In Basel, 1938, Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD-25: one small experimental compound among a long series of ergot derivatives. Five years later, on April 16, 1943, he accidentally encountered its extraordinary effects. On April 19, he deliberately took 250 micrograms and bicycled home through a radically altered world—the event later remembered as Bicycle Day. Fishbike turns that history into an underwater fable. Hofmann becomes **Albert Gills**; LSD becomes a bottle of lightning drops; and Fishbike—the woman on the impossible bicycle—rings her bell beside him as the molecule passes from medicine to secret control program, from countercultural explosion to prohibition, mythology, and its quiet reappearance in research. The title and refrain draw on Irina Dunn’s 1970 feminist line, later widely associated with Gloria Steinem: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Woman need a man like fish need bicycle. The trip continues.

THE VIDEO HAS TWO VERSIONS BACK TO BACK

FISHBIKE (Albert’s Lightning Drops)  

©2026 John F. Sendelbach

hold on tight.hold on tight.

pedal fish lady pedal fish lady pedal fish lady pedal fish lady

Albert Gills late shift rye-sea violet glow fungal castles black roots

Twenty-five lightning drops bottle marked shelved away

Nothing here says Albert Gills Maybe useful some far day

Five years gone laboratory breathing lamps school of silver stars

floor turns tide wall turns window window opens into Mars

Albert Gills on bicycle wobbling through cobalt night

Fishbike rings her handlebar bell Albert baby hold on tight

Fishbike Fishbike bicycle free

no captain owns the open tide no net owns the sea

Woman need a man like fish need bicycle

Fishbike make impossible look beautiful mythical