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.

THE SLIMY KNIVES

How My Mornings Go Wrong

Here is how it usually happens. I wake up, and before the coffee has done anything useful, there is a small thing sitting on my chest. Never a big thing. Big things come with experts and op-eds and opinions you can borrow. It's always something stupid and specific, a noise the truck made, a sentence somebody said at the post office, a piece of junk I took apart the day before. I lie there turning it over like a stone from the river, and somewhere around the second cup I notice it has a string attached, and if I pull on the string there's a bigger thing on the end of it, and by lunchtime I am holding a rope that runs straight down into the foundations of Western civilization and I have not yet put my pants on. This is either a gift or a disorder. I've stopped asking which.

My Turn: The Recorder promised to correct its mistakes. It hasn’t corrected mine.

 My Turn: The Recorder promised to correct its mistakes. It hasn’t corrected mine.

On June 12, 2020, the Recorder ran a story below the fold on its front page, with my name in the headline and a photograph of my bench. A few pages inside the same edition, its then-editor wrote: “We own up to our mistakes. We also correct them. It is part of responsible journalism.” I have spent six years waiting for the paper to apply that sentence to the story on its own front page.

ENGAGEMENT FARM © 2026 John F. Sendelbach — All Rights Reserved

 

ENGAGEMENT FARM
© 2026 John F. Sendelbach — All Rights Reserved

Engagement used to be a pledge,
A ring, a word, a vow,
Two gears meshing tooth to tooth,
Both sides committed now.
Now it's any twitch or flinch,
A thumb that slipped and stayed—
They count the reflex as a promise,
And they cash the pledge we made.

What Comes Back

What Comes Back

Last time I used a Facebook post to pick a fight with the space program, which my family will tell you is very on brand. A few of you made it to the end, and you deserve hazard pay. But one thing has bugged me since I posted it. I spent the whole piece on what we'd lose by shipping a civilization to Mars, and I never asked the obvious next question: what comes back?

I DON'T CAST A BALLOT © 2026 John F. Sendelbach — All Rights Reserved

I’ve spent a long time trying to think for myself in a country where everyone wants to tell me what I think. This comes from personal history, political disillusionment, decades of independent work, ecological concerns, institutional absurdities, and the recurring experience of watching other people confidently explain my own life back to me—usually without checking the facts first. It’s part political autopsy, part personal record, and part middle finger to the manufactured binary. Free markets, not corporate feudalism. Individual liberty, not institutional impunity. Skepticism in every direction, including toward the person holding the microphone. No party membership. No prescribed conclusions. No claim to infallibility. Just a lifetime of observations, some hard-earned convictions, a willingness to question the prevailing narrative, and the lingering suspicion that the people most certain they’ve figured me out are often the ones who’ve done the least homework. This is the source material. The song is what happened when it escaped.

~~~~~

The Preserving Machine A Dispatch from the Ground Floor

So here I am, back on Facebook after fifteen years in the wilderness, and since it's called Facebook, here's my face. Brace yourselves. For those who missed the interim, I spent part of that time inventing an alter ego called Johnnybitches, a guy who'd point a camera at himself and complain about whatever crawled under his skin that day, then throw it up on YouTube for the benefit of nobody in particular. Parking lots, bridges, committees, the general state of things, Johnnybitches had opinions. Well, he's back, and this may be the ultimate Johnnybitches, because today the man is bitching about the fate of the entire human species and whether we ought to pack up and move to Mars. Fittingly, the whole thing started right here, because coming back to this place is how I found the old friend who set it off.

WAYBACH MACHINE: March 2014 Neil Young cover

Looking for My Socks (and Other Proofs That Reality Is Fake)

It was barely dawn when the messages started coming in from the North Country, from an old friend I hadn't heard from in twenty years, a man who has grown lettuce for Mars, climbed British mountains with a heart patched together like a pair of good jeans, and now plays Satie at five in the morning between cups of coffee like a monk with a grudge. (Satie, for the record, owned seven identical gray velvet suits and died with about a hundred umbrellas in his apartment, so he's the right patron saint for this conversation.) My friend wanted to know how a man builds an inner shield against the darts of a jealous, petty, spiteful world. Light breakfast conversation. I was still looking for my socks, and I don't even wear socks. Be advised that this is a gonzo dispatch filed stone-cold sober, which may be a first for the genre.

The Empty Base: Rhonda Anderson, Tomantha Sylvester, and What Removal Left on the Mohawk Trail

A fiberglass roadside figure left Charlemont for Oklahoma. The historical question it exposed remains in western Massachusetts.

A record of public claims and acquaintance

On June 6, 2020, an edited video of me on the Bridge of Flowers was shared in a Facebook post that eventually drew 300+ comments and about 22,000 views. Rhonda Anderson, who was then serving as Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs, commented in it. She described having known me for about fourteen years; called me "a little unhinged" and "a conspiracy theorist type"; said she had had "this talk" with me many times over the years; said we had agreed to disagree; and described herself as a kind, thoughtful, supportive friend who had listened often.

get yours before they sell out

OPHS: 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.

The Manufacture

The full record is at johnsendelbach.com. This isn't that. This is about one thing: how a lie tries to build the truth it accused you of.

I was called a racist. A bigot. An antisemite. A Nazi. A Klansman — someone reached all the way for Grand Wizard. A danger to children. A woman-hater, mostly kept in the back room.

None of it was true. That's not the interesting part. The interesting part is that a false accusation of that size isn't trying to describe you. It's trying to build you.

It runs as a sequence, not an event. First the name — the biggest one available, the kind that ends conversations instead of starting them. Then the name travels, because names like that are built to travel, and reaches people who never met me and never will. They believe it the way you believe a headline about a stranger. Then they act on it. Not a mob with torches — smaller and worse. A cold shoulder in a shop. Work that stops coming. A neighbor who looks through you. A letter to a landlord. The accusation stops being words and becomes weather, and you live in it, every day, for years.

Greenfield – It’s a Beautiful Town ....RIVER WORKS PARK & BROOKIE

Greenfield – It’s a Beautiful Town ~ Pat Leuchtman

Between the Rows — August 24, 2019

To my eyes Greenfield becomes more beautiful every year. Many homes have less grass and more flower gardens that bring smiles to passers-by. There are flowering trees everywhere in the spring. Baystate Franklin Hospital, Greenfield Savings Bank and others have beautiful public plantings.

One new public garden is specifically designed to support pollinators, the birds and the bees. This Meadow Garden was planted and is being maintained by volunteers in front of the John Zon Community Center on Pleasant Street. Whether you walk on the Pleasant Street sidewalk, or want to stroll on a path through the middle of the garden, you are surrounded by blooming plants in every season. Nancee Bershoff spearheaded this project and Wisty Rorabacher made plant identification tags for the plants.

River Works Park

Recently I visited the River Works Park on Deerfield Street with Susan Worgaftik, a volunteer. Worgaftik helped make this attractive and comfortable park that could be enjoyed by the local community. In 2012 Mayor Martin stated his plan for that space and worked with Worgaftik and a dozen other volunteers.

Because this park is built on a site previously used by a gas station, the ground was contaminated and could not be used as a playground.

Worgaftik pointed to Brookie, the steel sculpture a stunning element of the garden.

“Every year the Wormtown Festival makes a donation to the town and that year, it was given to the park. That donation funded a sculpture which the mayor wanted. About 10 designs were presented but John Sendelbach’s brook trout, Brookie, was chosen. Then the call went out for stainless steel cutlery to help make the sculpture.

No Shred of Gray

I used to say people who dye their hair are liars.

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.