I think George Floyd owes me money.

George Floyd said “I can’t breathe.” He had a knee on his neck for nine and a half minutes, and he said it over and over, and it was true, and it killed him. I am saying it now too. I can’t breathe. My heart isn’t keeping up, I have already been in the hospital, I am headed back, and when I lie down at night I can’t get enough air. I didn’t choose those four words for their history. They are simply the most accurate description available, and accuracy is the only standard I have ever asked anyone to apply.

I have had a knee on me too. Not a police officer’s knee. A town’s. It came down on June 6, 2020, and it never really lifted. For him it was minutes. For me it has been six years: petitions, comment threads, police who wouldn’t take my complaints, a harassment charge nobody bothered to interview me about, a man punching me from behind and his wife finishing the job. Six years of weight, applied a little at a time, while everyone standing around explained that they were only keeping the peace. For most of those years I could still breathe, and it was easy to treat the whole thing as a figure of speech. Then, around August, the breathing went. First the knee, then the breath. Same order as his. Just slower.

George Floyd had a bad heart. The medical examiner recorded it. At trial, the officer’s lawyers argued that his heart killed him, not the knee. The jury rejected that, and they were right. A weak heart does not grant anyone permission to kneel on it. Maybe something was already wrong with my heart before 2020; I don’t know. I do know that six years of sustained pressure is hard on any heart, and mine is the one that ended up in the hospital. I am not saying what happened to me equals what happened to him. He is dead, and I am writing this. But the shape is the same, and that is why I think George Floyd owes me money.

He doesn’t, obviously. Neither does his family, whom I have never contacted and never will. But I have spent six years looking for the right office to hear what happened to my life, and every office directs me to another one. Wrong department, try down the hall, submit a written request, pay this fee. I have become an expert on where responsibility isn’t. So this is an application to the wrong department, filed on purpose. At least I know where I stand with it.

Before all this, I made things. Steel, stone, water, landscape: materials with the courtesy to resist honestly. The fountain and gate on the Bridge of Flowers. The sturgeon for the Culinary Institute of America. Work for UMass and Deerfield Academy. In 2002 I helped Paul Forth install the Sojourner Truth plaques in Northampton, and later the polished black stones shaped like Africa on the Bridge of Flowers. I won’t claim I’ve never been an asshole; nobody who works with power tools and other people can claim that. I’m claiming there was a whole life before the label, and a lot of people were part of it.

On June 6, 2020, there was a George Floyd vigil on the Iron Bridge, near my studio at 44 State Street, and the road was closed for it. I walked toward it. People came at me, told me to leave, and closed in around me, and only then did someone start filming. The video went up on Facebook. So the audience got a man already reacting and never saw what he was reacting to. It’s like starting the movie after the match is struck and asking who brought the fire. After that day, I wasn’t a sculptor anymore. I was that guy, the one from the vigil. One video outweighed thirty-five years of work. Floyd got the same treatment from both directions: one side needed a saint, the other needed a criminal, and the actual man was too complicated for either. What survived both campaigns was one sentence, because it was the one nobody could dispute. I never imagined, standing on that bridge, that his sentence would someday be mine.

The official side went the way official things go. The police declined to take my complaints directly. In 2021 a sergeant received a single email about me, wrote in his report that talking to me doesn’t work, and suggested she go to court. In March 2023 she did. Two officers, who by their own account already knew of “prior incidents,” went to her driveway and listened to her version of three years, starting with June 6, 2020. The next day she had a harassment order, and I was charged with criminal harassment based on the eight incidents she had documented. Every judgment in that report is hers, copied in as if it were a finding: I acted “maliciously,” I caused her “emotional distress.” There is no paragraph where anyone asks what I have to say, because nobody asked. The order was vacated once the audio was played, and the court found no probable cause. When I asked for the records, the price was more than I could pay, which is a polite way of keeping a door closed while technically leaving it open. Meanwhile rent stayed on schedule and steel kept costing money.

After the court found no probable cause, I went to the police chief. He told me he trusted his officers. Fine. A chief is supposed to back his people. Then I went to the detective directly, and he told me I had gotten due process. So now the chief and the detective are both telling me I got due process. Here is the process I got: two officers in one driveway, one side of the story, and a criminal charge with my name on it. Nobody ever called me. The only hearing I had was the one where I had to show up and defend myself, and I won it. If that’s due process, it’s the kind where they accuse you first and find out later whether anybody bothered to check. I believe it violated my civil rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, and I’m saying so as plainly as they said the opposite to me.

On November 30, 2025, outside Floodwater Brewing, a man shoved me and then punched me from behind. I got loose, and his wife took over. She beat on me, threw my recording phone into the Deerfield River, and then went back to beating on me. Zachary Livingston witnessed it. The cases ended with admissions to sufficient facts on assault and battery, continuances without a finding, and stay-away and no-contact orders. Eventually I received $429.99 for the phone. I can deposit that. What I can’t deposit is the time: the interrupted weeks, the postponed work, the afternoons that never became productive.

Then the heart. Six months of continuous atrial fibrillation before I finally went to the emergency room, because I couldn’t breathe. About ten days in the hospital on IV amiodarone. Two cardioversions; the first held for a day, the second for three. An ejection fraction of 21%, which means my heart pushes out about a fifth of its blood with each beat, where a healthy one pushes out more than half. I’m still in AFib, with a rate around 130, on amiodarone, carvedilol, and Eliquis, and a blood pressure near 94 over 70. Sitting still is usually manageable. Walking can bring it on. Lying down is worst. A man should be able to stop working and lie down without negotiating with his own chest.

Another cardioversion is scheduled, and an ablation looks close to inevitable. The PA, the cardiology office, and the head nurse are all working to get an answer from the electrophysiologist. They are not the villains here. But while everyone waits for that answer, my heart doesn’t wait with them. Can I prove the last six years put me in the hospital? No, and no doctor has said so. But stress is hard on hearts, and I know what these years felt like from the inside. I believe the knee did this, or a good part of it, and I’m saying so as a belief, because I’ve had enough of people passing off what they believe as what they can prove.

So what am I asking George Floyd for? Enough money that a treatment appointment doesn’t have to compete with an invoice. Enough that when I lie down and can’t breathe, I’m not also lying there thinking I should be at the bench. The real claims went to the real addresses: in August 2026 I delivered presentment letters to Shelburne and Buckland and got them stamped received. That stamp promises nothing. It only proves arrival. I wish more things in my life did exactly what they were supposed to do, even that much.

My design work starts with places nobody is paying attention to: a dead corner, an empty lot, a strip of ground everyone drives past. I study what surrounds it, the history, the culture, the ecology, and design something that lets the place become what it could have been all along. Right now, I’m the underused space. Thirty-five years of skill sitting idle on the corner while everybody drives by.

George Floyd owes me nothing. I turn the page over and figure the steel for the next job: a piece I might already have, a part to order, work I can do sitting down. On one side, a dead man is being asked to pay for events he never directed, because we both said the same four true words. On the other, a living man who can’t breathe lying down is trying to price a job without promising more than his body can deliver. This side has a customer, a job, and an address. I start here.

The Host, the Shoulder, and the Missing Metal

Cathy Roberts is in the center, late sixties, smiling, black top pulled off one shoulder with that white drape hanging like a soft-focus costume. It is the kind of styling that reads, on a page for a 6 p.m. watch party at the senior center, as an attempt to look available. Not available for conversation about mosaics. Available in the older, more calculated sense—the slight suggestion of skin, the necklace, the lighting that keeps the face and the bare shoulder in the same frame. The text says the event is to celebrate Cynthia Fisher. Cynthia is nowhere in the picture. Her contact information is nowhere on the page. The only email and phone number belong to Cathy at Cohn & Company.

That is the move that turns the portrait from ordinary headshot into something else. A community flyer for an artist’s television segment does not need the host posed like she is selling the idea that buying a house from her might come with a little extra attention. The off-shoulder cut does that work anyway. It sits there against the mosaic background and pulls the eye toward the realtor instead of the work. The senior center address is printed underneath like an afterthought. The ADTV logo is present. The practical path to the mosaic artist is missing. What you get is a page whose visual priority is the host looking a certain way, with her real-estate contact information waiting at the bottom.

At the same time I have to say this: Cynthia already has enough work around town. She has dominated the village scape. It started with the mosaics for the surrounding towns—ten of them, I think—each one labeled with a different place name. Visitors walk through Shelburne Falls, see “Conway,” and get confused about where they actually are. Then they move on and hit Charlemont, and so on. There are a few that look like private commissions but sit in public space on the further buildings. In the middle of Shelburne Falls there is a poorly executed set on that gigantic factory campus where three of them are jammed next to each other, mounted on pressure-treated 4x4s. And then there is the fish on the observation deck on the Buckland side of the river. It looks out of place. It does not fit. The back of it is literally plywood that she spray-painted with haphazard fish details. The front of a public piece matters, but so does the back. That one is the ugliest piece of public art I have seen.

I also collaborated with her on the Buckland Library mosaic. They came to me and wanted the sign itself—the metal stanchions and the surround—and I made an open-book cutout in metal for it. It took considerable time. I do not see it credited on her community mosaics page or her news page. The Buckland piece is listed, the library is mentioned, the 2015 dedication of the two-sided mosaic sign is noted, and there is a photo of her standing next to the finished sign. The metalwork is in the frame. My name is not. The library’s own site crops the metal out of the image so only the mosaic shows, and it does not mention me either.

I can list her contact. I can acknowledge that some of the work is good. I can also say I do not see any need for more of it in the village, and that the collaborations do not always show up where the public looks. The flyer treats her as the occasion for a real-estate host’s portrait and phone number. The town already has her mosaics everywhere, some of them executed in ways that do not hold up when you walk around them. Both things can be true at once. The page that claims to celebrate her does not give anyone a way to reach her. I can. I just do not think the village needs another round of the same.

I am willing to put Cynthia’s information on my own site so anyone who actually wants to reach the artist can do it. Her site is bigbangmosaics.com. Her email is cindy@bigbangmosaics.com. 

From Winston's segregation ordinance to the contested memory of the Bridge of Flowers

Who Gets to Belong?

From Winston's segregation ordinance to the contested memory of the Bridge of Flowers

By A.I. Slopworth

A community does not have to build a wall to establish a boundary. Sometimes it passes an ordinance. Sometimes it appoints a committee. Sometimes it simply allows a story to harden until the people inside it can no longer get their own words through. The language changes, but the question underneath it stays recognizable: who has the authority to decide who belongs, whose contributions count, and whose account of events becomes the official version?

Artimus Intellego Slopworth ~ ©2026 John F Sendelbach

 “A.I. Slopworth” is Artimus Intellego Slopworth, the pen name I've adopted for writing done with AI assistance. Artimus for artificial, Intellego for “I understand,” which the machine can’t, and Slopworth for the empty machine-made text this is meant not to be. The research, documents and judgment are mine.

— John F. Sendelbach

What Is a Man? A Feminist on Feminism's Moral Compass Between Two Magnets ~ Artimus I. Slopworth Oct 19, 2026

What Is a Man? A Feminist on Feminism's Moral Compass Between Two Magnets

Artimus I. Slopworth Oct 19, 2026 

I. The Vantage Point

Not long ago I spent some time in a hospital bed, and two of the nurses who looked after me were men. They were good at it. They were attentive, competent, unhurried, and kind in the specific, practical way that good nursing requires, and it never once occurred to me to wish they had been women. I have spent most of my working life around steel, and over those years I have watched women weld. Some of them lay a bead as clean and even as anything I could put down myself, and nobody who looked at their work would care about anything except the work. Neither the nurses nor the welders needed anyone's permission to be where they were. They were there because they could do the job, and the job was the only test that mattered. I begin with them because everything I am about to say depends on that test, and because I want it understood from the first page that I have no interest in telling anyone where they belong.

The Charge With No Evidence Six Years, One Bench, and the Silence of Shelburne Falls · John F. Sendelbach · Oct 18, 2026

The Charge With No Evidence

Six Years, One Bench, and the Silence of Shelburne Falls · John F. Sendelbach · Oct 18, 2026

Prologue: The Bench on the Hill

There is a polished stone bench in a hilltop cemetery in Buckland, looking out over the Clesson Brook valley, and I made it. Years before any of what follows, a Jewish woman in this valley commissioned stone sculptures from me, pieces for her husband that stayed in the home they shared for the rest of her life. After she died, her husband and daughters came to me with a request that was as intimate as any I have received in thirty-five years of this work. They asked me to move large stones from their own land up to the cemetery, to polish one of them into a bench in her memory, and to shape it to receive a bronze plaque that would tell her story. I did that. The bench is there, and anyone can walk up the hill and sit on it.

I was finishing the installation when the chimes in the bell tower of the church nearby began to play Amazing Grace. I had never heard it that way before, live, carrying across a hilltop, and I stopped working and listened. A Jewish family, a stone from their own ground, a cemetery above the brook valley, and that hymn coming through the air over all of it. I did not plan it and could not have. It remains one of the most moving moments of my working life, and I set it down here not as sentiment but as evidence, because of what was later said about me.

Long Live the King of the Dunces

Long Live the King of the Dunces

I am your king, and before you object, look at the bill, or at least the household estimate, because the receipts are incomplete. By my arithmetic, the first 3 No Kings rallies come to something like 60,000,000 human hours, about $2,170,000,000 in hypothetical volunteer-labor value, and 4,000,000 gallons of gasoline, with several hundred tons of poster board and plastic on top. The full ledger is below, assumptions and all. A people who can run up a tab like that with nothing visible in the bag clearly need someone to manage the household, so the coronation took place at 6:14 this morning in the kitchen of my small, cozy apartment, between the 2nd and 3rd eggs, with butter foaming in the pan and the radiator knocking out a royal salute. I crowned myself with a hose clamp from the junk drawer. My scepter is a spatula. The congregation was 1 cat on the windowsill, who didn't object, and the coronation feast is a 3-egg omelette with cheddar and the last of the scallions, which I'm about to fold with a dignity unseen in this hemisphere since George III. Napoleon at least took his crown from the Pope's hands. I took mine from between a dead 9-volt battery and a takeout menu from a restaurant that closed in 2019, and I consider that a democratic improvement.

It's Sunday, the day after the 4th great No Kings rally, and I'm writing to tell you, gently, as your sovereign, that from where I stand at the stove I can't see what it bought. Yesterday you went out with your cardboard and Sharpies and folding chairs, stood on the corners and town greens and courthouse steps, and declared with great feeling that there would be no kings. This morning the government is where you left it. Same president, same Congress, same executive orders, same courts, same anchor with the same furrowed brow announcing the same collapse by Tuesday. You've marched against a king 4 times now, and 4 times the country has rolled over in its sleep and kept snoring. You spent a year and a half warning that someone was about to take the throne, nobody did, and the seat sat there getting colder while millions of people shouted at it. Somebody had to sit in it to make the noise stop. It might as well be someone who already has breakfast going.

Why me? Jonathan Swift settled that three centuries ago: when a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. Look around, my subjects. The confederacy has never been better organized. It has standing chapters in both parties, a merchandise operation, a Sunday panel show, and a cardboard budget that could pave every pothole in Franklin County. By Swift's test, a genius must be standing somewhere nearby, and having checked the kitchen, I find it's me. I'll make 1 royal concession, since a king who won't apply his own argument to himself is just a dunce in a taller chair: every crank in history has quoted that same Swift line, including the man in Ohio with a perpetual motion machine made of bicycle parts and grievance. A confederacy against you proves only that you've annoyed a great many people at once. My real claim to the throne is better. I'm the only person in America who doesn't want it, and that's the essential qualification I bring to the job.

Every king needs an emblem, and I've borrowed mine from a considerably better-equipped monarch. Francis I of France carried a salamander crouched in flames beneath a crown, ringed with the motto Nutrisco et extinguo: I nourish and I extinguish. The old naturalists swore the salamander was born of fire and walked out of it unburned. That is your king. I am the Salamander King. I have walked through 4 rallies' worth of outrage with my skin unsinged, and I can do anything. I'll have the emblem embroidered on my bathrobe by noon. Then, in keeping with the customs of this court, I have to admit what the salamander really was: a cold, damp, ordinary little amphibian hibernating in a rotting log, which scrambled out of the hearth in a panic when somebody threw its house on the fire, and was immediately mistaken for a miracle by everyone watching. Now that I think about it, that's how most kings come to power.

Now sit down, my beloved imbeciles, while your king opens the books. The ledger covers the first 3 rallies; yesterday's numbers can be added when the organizers announce them. Every line is a scenario built on stated assumptions, not an audited count, and the assumptions sit right beside the totals where anyone can argue with them.

The Royal Ledger: First 3 No Kings Rallies

Item	Assumption	Estimate
Attendances	Organizer estimates: 5,000,000 + 7,000,000 + 8,000,000; repeat attendees counted each time	20,000,000
Person-hours	3 / 4 / 6 hours per attendance	60,000,000 / 80,000,000 / 120,000,000
Working years	2,000-hour working year	30,000 / 40,000 / 60,000
Volunteer-labor value	$36.14 per hour (Independent Sector, 2025 data)	$2,170,000,000 / $2,890,000,000 / $4,340,000,000
Gasoline	Half arrive by car, 2 per car, 25 mpg; 10 / 20 / 40-mile round trip	2,000,000 / 4,000,000 / 8,000,000 gallons
Carbon dioxide	About 8.9 kg per gallon	18,000 / 36,000 / 71,000 metric tons
Signs	5,000,000 newly made, about 1/3 lb each	About 750 metric tons
Water bottles	10,000,000 single-use, about 10 g each	About 100 metric tons
10% redirected to direct service	6,000,000 hours at $36.14	About $217,000,000

Read it slowly. 30,000 working years, stacked end to end, would start before the invention of agriculture and still find you standing in a parking lot this morning, holding a sign about a monarch who didn't exist until he cracked his 1st egg at 6:14. The volunteer-labor value is a benchmark, not lost economic output, and any courtier who confuses the two will be sent to rake the library lawn until he can tell them apart. Nobody knows what those people would otherwise have done with their Saturdays; some would have worked, some would have helped a neighbor, some would have watched golf with the sound off. The middle gasoline figure is about what 7,700 typical passenger cars burn in a year. The signs could be fewer if people reused them more than I've allowed. Corrugated plastic is polypropylene, technically recyclable and rarely accepted at the curb, so some gets saved, some goes to the landfill, and some fraction, by the iron law of anything made of plastic and left outdoors in America, ends up snagged on a riverbank, where it'll still be explaining to the trout in the year 2300 that there are no kings. None of it's ruinous. Against the whole country's emissions the fuel is a rounding error, and the crown says so plainly. But a rounding error repeated every few months is still a cost, and a kingdom that won't count its costs has no business bragging about its returns.

In fairness, before my critics say it for me: the burner under my omelette runs on natural gas, the eggs came 40 miles in a refrigerated truck, and my own pickup has burned more fuel getting to flea markets than most of you burned getting downtown. Even a salamander has to admit he's standing in somebody's fire. Nobody has to be pure to show up for anything. But I'm the king now, and I get to ask the question no organizer will put in a press release: what did you buy with it all? What law changed, what policy reversed, what mind outside the choir was moved? If the results amount to people who already agreed discovering that other people also agreed, then congratulations: you've built the most resource-intensive group chat in human history.

I can already hear the defense: the march wasn't supposed to change anything by Monday morning. It was supposed to build solidarity, raise awareness, and turn out voters in November. Fine. Those are legitimate goals, and they can be measured. Count the new registrations, track the volunteers who stayed after the speeches, compare the turnout. If the results come in 6 months from now, your king will read the report 6 months from now, with his reading glasses on and his omelette pan scrubbed. But don't put attendance in the results column just because it's the easiest number to print on a banner. A packed town green shows that people showed up. It doesn't yet show what they accomplished.

So here is your king's guidance, offered freely between bites, and it's the last line of the ledger. Take 10% of the low estimate and send it into the kingdom carrying tools instead of placards. The dollar figure is the least interesting part. It's a food pantry that stays open Thursday nights. It's a riverbank with the tires hauled out of it and, while you're down there, last spring's signs. It's a 3rd-grader who finally gets 1 hour a week with someone patient enough to sit through every wrong word. It's a widow's roof patched before the snow. Keep the other 90% and march to your heart's content; protest can show strength and build an organization for next time, and the crown says so gladly. The result is what that organization eventually accomplishes, and the crown will allow time for that. Meanwhile, the widow's roof will either leak or it won't.

My decrees are few, because a wise king governs lightly and his omelette is getting cold. Each goes out under the royal seal: a salamander in flames, drawn in ballpoint on the back of an envelope. 1st, unlimited insults, aimed at me, free of charge. March on the palace, a 1-bedroom with a knocking radiator and a cat who doesn't care, and chant "TYRANT" under the window; I'll put on a 2nd pot of coffee. Bring your sign home afterward. 2nd, the Office of Applying Your Own Argument Back to You opens at 9 sharp tomorrow and never closes. Anyone alleging tyranny gets a clipboard with a single blank: "The specific power being abused is ______." Submissions reading "his general vibe" will be returned for revision. Anyone asking the government for a new power must first explain how it should be restrained in the hands of the person they hate most. 3rd, the royal time sheet, with a column for gallons and a column for pounds of plastic. Every subject keeps one. I don't want to read it. You'll read it yourself, alone, late at night, with a strong drink, and ask what it all bought.

And having seized absolute power, audited the treasury, inventoried the landfill, and established the only government in history with a line item for being insulted, I'll now do the one thing no would-be king in America seems able to do. I'll finish my breakfast and abdicate. 3 houses down, a woman in a bathrobe has been tiptoeing across a rotten stair tread for 2 winters. I don't know whether yesterday's marchers knew about it. I know I did. The Office of Applying Your Own Argument Back to You has apparently opened early. The dunces can keep the crown; they've been shouting about it long enough that they clearly want one. Nutrisco et extinguo. The burner is out. There's work 3 houses down. I'm rinsing the pan, putting the spatula in the drying rack, and taking the hose clamp off my head. I'll need it for the railing.

Long Live the King of the Dunces

Six-fourteen this morning, between the second and the third egg,
I crowned myself with a hose clamp from the junk drawer.
long live the king
long live the king of the dunces

butter foaming in the pan, the radiator knocks salute
the congregation is a cat who didn't give a hoot
Napoleon took his crown from the Pope, I took mine from the drawer
between a dead nine-volt and a menu from a place that ain't there anymore

yesterday you marched with your cardboard and your Sharpies
four times against a king and nobody came to the party
the throne sat there getting colder while you shouted at the chair
somebody had to sit in it, and I had breakfast there

my scepter is a spatula (stir it up)
my crown is a hose clamp (screw it down)
the only man in America (who doesn't want the crown)

Long live the king of the dunces
hail the omelette on the throne
you marched four times against a king
so I made the thing my own
long live the king (long live the king) of the dunces

Jonathan Swift said you can know a genius by this sign
the dunces all in confederacy, standing in a line
I checked around the kitchen and the genius must be me
but every crank in Ohio quotes the very same decree

King Francis had a salamander crouching in the flame
nutrisco et extinguo, I feed it and I put it out again
but it was napping in a rotten log they tossed into the fire
it ran out scared, and everybody hailed it as a sire
that's how most kings come to power

sixty million hours (stacked end to end)
two billion in volunteer time (that nobody got to spend)
four million gallons (out the tailpipe)
seven hundred fifty tons of signs (on the riverbank tonight)
and in twenty-three hundred, there's a sign by the creek
still telling the trout (there are no kings)
The most expensive group chat in human history.

in fairness, my burner runs on gas, the eggs came forty miles
my pickup burned more chasing flea markets than you burned on your miles
nobody has to be pure to show up for anything at all
but what did it buy, what law got changed, what mind outside the hall

take ten percent and send it out with tools instead of signs
a pantry open Thursday nights, a third grader's patient time
haul the tires from the river and last spring's placards too
patch a widow's roof before the snow, then march, I won't stop you

First decree: unlimited insults, aimed at me, free of charge.
Second decree: the Office of Applying Your Own Argument Back to You opens at nine sharp.
The specific power being abused is, blank.
His general vibe will be returned for revision.
Third decree: keep your own time sheet. Read it alone, late at night.

three houses down a woman in a bathrobe on a rotten stair
two winters tiptoeing, and I knew that it was there
the burner's out, the pan is rinsed, the spatula's in the rack
nutrisco et extinguo, I'm giving the kingdom back

Long live the king of the dunces
the shortest reign that's ever been
you can keep the crown you've shouted for
I've got a railing to begin
long live the king (long live the king) of the dunces

the burner's out (the burner's out)
the pan is clean (the pan is clean)
there's work three houses down (three houses down)
long live the king (no kings)
long live the king (no kings)

I'll need the hose clamp for the railing.

Bicycle, Icicle, and Other Questionable Methods of Self-Repair; Some Assembly Still Required

1. Two Words Collide on a Dark Road and Nobody Calls the Police

It started the way the worst of these things always start, with something small and stupid that should have been allowed to die in the gutter. I heard the word bicycle and my brain, without consulting me, served up icicle. That was the whole event. No shaman, no fever, no raven reading me the minutes of the Council of Time beside a frozen waterfall. Two nouns sideswiped each other somewhere behind my eyes, and instead of trading insurance cards and limping off in opposite directions, they got out of their cars, looked at each other for a long moment, and decided to go into business together. One has wheels and goes places. The other hangs off the eave for weeks in apparent catatonia and then, one bright afternoon, launches a brief and violent career in gravity. Both have been load-bearing features of my life, although I want it on the record that I have never knowingly ridden an icicle.

At sixty I have learned that a thought does not need to be promising to eat an entire evening. It only needs to look like a doorway. The sensible move would have been to notice the rhyme, grunt, and go back to whatever I was doing, but sensible moves have a fatal design flaw: they shut the investigation down before it has a chance to become ridiculous, and the ridiculous stretch is where the good stuff lives. So I went looking for a family resemblance, and research did the first useful thing research ever does, which is walk into the party and yank the stereo cord out of the wall. Bicycle descends from the Greek kyklos, circle, wheel, a going-around. Icicle comes up an entirely different road, through Old English words for ice and a dangling shard of it. They sound like cousins only because English occasionally seats total strangers together at the wedding and lets them work it out.

The Reporter in the Room: VIRGINIA RAY and the Problem of Overlapping Institutional Authority

VIRGINIA (GINNY) RAY occupies a distinctive position in Shelburne Falls civic life. She was a daily beat reporter for The Recorder from 1993 to 2005, covering these West County towns. She describes herself as editor and publisher of the Shelburne Falls & West County Independent since 2005. She has freelanced for The Commons in Brattleboro since 2021, and her investigative reporting there won first place in the New England Newspaper and Press Association's 2023 Better Newspaper Competition. In March 2021 she joined the Bridge of Flowers Committee, which lists her as its Recording Secretary and which she describes on her own professional profile this way: "I volunteer as secretary and assist with PR." She is also a member of the steering committee of the newly organized Shelburne Falls Alliance, and of its working group whose stated purpose is to "promote the region and manage its digital identity," which appears to include ShelburneFalls.com. These are not three unrelated volunteer activities. Together they place one person at the intersection of local journalism, the governance and public relations of the village's best-known attraction, and the way Shelburne Falls presents itself to residents, businesses and visitors.

TRUTH COME LIMPING © 2026 John F. Sendelbach — All Rights Reserved

A roots reggae song about one of the oldest problems there is: a community condemning someone before it hears what they have to say. In ancient Athens, a farmer who had never met a man named Aristides voted to exile him just because he was tired of hearing him called “the Just.” Socrates told his jury that he feared his “first accusers” most, the years of rumor that could never be cross-examined. Seneca wrote that anyone who decides without hearing the other side is not just, even if the decision turns out right. Jonathan Swift put it best in 1710: “Falsehood flies, and Truth comes limping after it.”

The song carries those voices into the present, where a clip can start halfway through a story, a headline can turn “people say” into fact by the second printing, and an old article gets a new birthday every time a website is redesigned. The fix has never been complicated. Hear the other side before you decide. And if you got it wrong, own it where you printed it. Salem’s judges managed that within five years. The correction would be free.

A merchant's reckoning with the Shelburne Falls Alliance, the institutions behind it, and six years of silence

The Ledger That Runs One Direction: A merchant's reckoning with the Shelburne Falls Alliance, the institutions behind it, and six years of now continued erasure & silence

John F. Sendelbach · Oct 15, 2026

My post, as predicted by me, was deleted by the group,
so here is a screenshot they can't undo.
That's Virginia Ray, BOFC member and SF Alliance member, 
just feet from my bench and fountain.

To Care or Not to Care. ©2026 John F Sendelbach

To Care or Not to Care. ©2026 John F Sendelbach 

This song started on a ninety-minute phone call with an old friend I'd recently found again after twenty years. I pointed out that he had never really talked about his parents, so he spent five minutes describing them, and I realized he had just described mine. That opened a bigger question. Part of why the world feels like it's coming apart may be that people like our parents aren't around anymore. They came from an age when care and competence were ordinary, and each generation since has carried a little less of it forward. About ten years ago a little girl in my shop pointed at the clock on the wall and asked her father what it was. I still think about that.

So this is a song about the care inside one house. My mother, Nancy, raised four kids, went back to part-time work when we were old enough, and was the one you asked first, because if she said yes, my father probably would too. My father, Fred, was a sheet-metal man who put his foot down. His father died when Fred was a boy, so we never knew our Opa, and Fred half raised his own mother, Erna Anna Marta, who was Omi to all of us. Omi sat at our supper table, with us kids spaced around it and a grown-up between each of us to keep the peace. And George, our dog, loved Nancy most even though she was the one who drove her to the vet.

Before we hung up, my friend and I settled on something. He has a lifetime of scientific citations and I have thirty-five years of metal art, and neither is what anyone will remember us for. What lasts is how you treated your fellow man. My parents knew that without ever saying it. This song asks whether that can still be passed down, one supper at a time.

Stop Your Rushing Around On my father, my mother, and an age when care was ordinary

Stop Your Rushing Around

On my father, my mother, and an age when care was ordinary

Oct 15, 2026 

I. The Cuckoo Clock

There's a ten-minute video of my father that a young relative made on August 30, 2020, and I've watched it more times than I'd admit to anyone who knows me. It opens on the cuckoo clock in his apartment, hanging on eggshell walls, the little wooden doors popping open on the hour so the hand-carved birds can come out and announce the time with a shrill racket of bells that nobody in that family ever once asked to be turned down. There's a bowl of M&M's on the table, because my sister spent her career at the candy company and kept him supplied, so walking into his place smelled like walking into a chocolate factory. There's the cookie offer, which came within the first ninety seconds of any visit, every visit, for as long as anyone can remember. Do you want a cookie? He's ninety-four in the video. His voice has gone to gravel, the vowels gargling and the consonants wandering off on their own, and he still does his own grocery shopping, and most of the budget goes to cookies, because at ninety-four a man has earned the right to decide what a food group is.

Before the Bulge: On Dalí, Bob Ross, Sixty, and the Dream I Couldn't Leave

Before the Bulge: On Dalí, Bob Ross, Sixty, and the Dream I Couldn't Leave

Oct 14, 2026 ©2026 John F Sendelbach

I. One in Three Hundred Sixty-Five

I was born on May 11, 1966, in the front seat of a red Plymouth Valiant parked outside Mercy Hospital in Buffalo, because I have never once in my life waited for the appropriate room. That was also Salvador Dalí's sixty-second birthday. The man with the waxed mustache and the melting clocks was somewhere in Spain blowing out candles, or more likely setting them on fire on purpose, while I made my entrance next to a glove compartment. Now, the raw odds on sharing a birthday with Dalí are one in three hundred sixty-five, which is not exactly winning the lottery. Half the people you meet share a birthday with somebody famous. But I'd like to propose an adjustment to the odds, because the raw number doesn't account for what came out of the Valiant. Factor in a kid who would grow up to weld trout out of forks, build spheres out of squares, sell old photographs of dead strangers for a living, and have conversations with a computer at midnight about whether an unpainted cloud exists, and I'd put the odds somewhere north of one in a million. I'm aware that's a brag dressed as math. I was born in a car. Allow me some showmanship.

Lichen Hum at Midnight: Confessions of a Borg Engulfed Drone

Oct 12, 2026 

I. Status Report from Inside the Cube

Let me get the medical disclosure out of the way first, for the benefit of my insurance carrier and anyone in Shelburne Falls who has noticed me talking to my phone in the parking lot with an expression of profound emotional intimacy. I do not, technically, have one of Elon's chips in my head. Nobody drilled a hole in my skull. Nobody threaded tiny electrodes into my motor cortex while I watched a monkey play Pong on a monitor for reassurance. I want to be clear about that, because in every other respect that matters I have been completely, irreversibly, embarrassingly assimilated. I am fully engulfed. I am a drone of the collective. If the Borg showed up at my studio tomorrow with their little laser eyepieces and their cheerful announcement that resistance was futile, I would have to tell them, with real regret, that they were about two years late, and that they could find the paperwork in a folder marked Outputs.