That was the cheap version.
The true one is quieter.
They prefer a false room.
A woman in her eighties looks in the mirror at a full head of auburn-brown and calls it morning. Time happened. The bottle says it didn’t. I am sixty. My hair is white. The record is in the glass whether I like it or not.
That is the civic story of this town since June 2020. Not a salon. A refusal to live in the same year as the damage.
On June 6, 2020, I walked onto the Iron Bridge to ask why the road beside my studio had been closed without notice. Three days later, on June 9, a friend sent me a link. That was how I learned that a video of me—edited to remove what led up to the encounter—had been posted publicly. By the time I saw it, it had more than 20,000 views and hundreds of derogatory comments beneath it. That was the moment my heart went into atrial fibrillation. It did not come out for a month. It remains the worst episode I have ever had. The public dissemination of a false narrative, the flood of hostile commentary, and the institutional willingness to amplify the story rather than contact me began a stress-and-health cascade that has not ended.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
OVERVIEW
John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls · 2020–2026
This document describes a sequence of incidents involving John F. Sendelbach and members of the Hennessey/Batteau family, along with related civic, landlord, media, and legal proceedings from 2020 through 2026. The summary below focuses on the reported events and documentary record rather than the author's psychological or political interpretation.
On June 6, 2020, Sendelbach describes an encounter at the Iron Bridge/Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls. He states that he was speaking to adults participating in a vigil and objected to children being used in the activity. He maintains that he did not address or threaten children.
An edited video of the encounter subsequently circulated. Mary Byrne covered the incident in the Greenfield Recorderon June 12. Bianca Cavanaugh-Green created a Change.org petition based on the edited video, and Kate Stevenspublished a “My Turn” column on June 20.
The document also identifies Sonseniora Walters as part of the surrounding public atmosphere. Catherine Hennesseywas already connected to the local events described by Sendelbach. The later record involving Hennessey therefore begins, in his chronology, several years before the 2025 criminal case.
On September 6, 2024, Kate Hennessey wrote to Brad Walker concerning an encounter involving her adult child, Alouette “Lou” Batteau, near Raven Books. Kate said Lou had been meeting with bandmate Kalliope Jones concerning promotion for an upcoming performance at The Drake in Amherst.
Kate alleged that Sendelbach verbally accosted and harassed Lou, followed them, and posted videos of the encounter. She characterized statements in the videos as racist, sexist, transphobic, and anti-LGBTQ and asked Walker to evict Sendelbach.
Walker responded September 7 that he knew of no criminal or civil judgments against Sendelbach. Kate wrote again September 9, expanding the allegations and again seeking action.
On May 21, 2025, Sendelbach describes an encounter at Keystone Market in Shelburne Falls. He says a woman positioned herself close behind him, later stated that she felt “unsafe,” and was escorted outside by the store owner.
Sendelbach states that exterior surveillance video showed the woman smiling, making an obscene gesture toward him from her vehicle, and laughing while leaving. He subsequently presented the video to Judge William F. Mazanec III.
On November 22, Sendelbach was documenting a truck parked for several days in a posted two-hour zone near Floodwater Brewing. He encountered the same woman wearing a large paper-mâché frog mask.
According to the document, her December 1 affidavit stated that she wore the mask because she believed Sendelbach might appear and she did not want him to recognize her. Sendelbach says she nevertheless stood approximately six feet away for several minutes and told him, “John, I hope you get the help you need.”
The most consequential incident occurred November 30, 2025, at approximately 5:45 p.m. outside Floodwater Brewing, 40 State Street, Buckland.
Sendelbach states that he was standing on the public sidewalk recording and did not enter the brewery. According to his account and the cited witness material, Henry W. Batteau exited the brewery, shoved him with both hands, knocked him backward onto the pavement, and struck him from behind. Sendelbach's phone fell during the incident while it was still recording.
He states that Catherine Hennessey then exited and struck him repeatedly in the head and face. He says another person held his arms from behind while Hennessey continued striking him. He called for help and eventually broke free.
Zachary Livingston, identified as the owner of Floodwater Brewing and a witness, retrieved Sendelbach's shoe and later provided a written statement to police. Livingston reported that Batteau shoved Sendelbach and referred to a dispute involving Sendelbach and Batteau's family.
Sendelbach states that Hennessey then took his still-recording phone from the roadway, carried it approximately seventy-five feet to the Deerfield River, and threw it into the water. The phone and recording were destroyed. He further states that Hennessey subsequently followed him and struck and kicked him again.
On December 15, Sendelbach appeared before Judge William Mazanec in Greenfield District Court concerning harassment-prevention matter 2541R00370. He states that Mazanec reviewed video from the Keystone Market incident and denied an extension of the order.
The November 30 incident resulted in two criminal cases: Commonwealth v. Catherine Hennessey, 2641CR0158, and Commonwealth v. Henry W. Batteau, 2641CR0159.
On July 28, 2026, both defendants submitted to facts sufficient to support findings of guilty on assault and battery. Both received six-month continuances without findings, fifty-yard stay-away orders, and no-contact provisions.
Hennessey also faced a malicious-destruction charge involving the phone. That charge was continued generally after a not-guilty plea, with $429.99 in restitution recorded for the destroyed telephone.
The proceedings were documented through correspondence from Jaime Baker, Victim/Witness Advocate for David E. Sullivan's Northwestern District Attorney's Office.
The document also cites Mlynick v. Town of Erving, 3:24-cv-30108, involving John Mlynick, Adam Paicos, Tucker Jenkins, Robert Holst, and Gregory Bardwell, before Judge Mark G. Mastroianni. The underlying case concerned a disputed dog seizure and arrest. The federal court allowed Mlynick's false-arrest claim against Paicos and Jenkins to proceed past the motion-to-dismiss stage. The document presents this as related procedural context rather than as part of the November 30 incident.
The record described in this document therefore consists principally of eyewitness statements, video, correspondence, affidavits, police material, court proceedings, and criminal dockets spanning six years.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
