Who Is Next? The One Man Who Spoke Up in 2020

Six years ago this summer, when an online petition was trying to get my art removed from Shelburne Falls and the Greenfield Recorder had put it on the front page, one person I had never met sat down and wrote to the paper in my defense. His name is Jim Bates, and he lives in Gill. He wrote his first letter on the morning of June 12, 2020, the day the Recorder’s front-page story ran. It was never printed. A month later he tried again, and on July 15, 2020 the Recorder ran his letter under the title “Who is next?” I’ve dug it up because in six years it remains the only public defense of me that anyone put in writing, and because it asked, in real time, the question nobody else in this valley would ask.

He wrote: “A petitioner states, ‘I want my community to be represented in a positive and loving way.’ Hypocrisy! Am I wrong? How is calling out a person based on their skin color and gender... to publicly shame, ridicule and chastise him, threatening his business and livelihood, acting in ‘a positive and loving way’? I think it is the exact opposite.” And he named what it was: “Plain and simple a mob mentality: Encircle an individual, then shout them down, because they disagree with you. If this type of mob think continues, where will it lead to? Who is next?”

He was right about all of it, and he was right early. Three days after the Recorder’s story, Change.org took the petition down. The paper never reported why. The person who started it later wrote publicly that after talking with me she found me “very kind and understanding.” The paper never reported that either. What did follow was six years of what Jim Bates predicted: a lost studio, lost commissions, police reports that went nowhere, and finally, last November, a beating on a public sidewalk in Buckland. In July, the two people who did it admitted in court to facts sufficient for a finding of guilty. As for “who is next,” the answer is whoever this town decides to encircle next, unless more people are willing to do what one man from Gill did in 2020 and say so out loud.

Jim, if you see this: thank you. It mattered more than you could have known.

His letter: https://recorder.com/2020/07/15/ltr-bates-mobmentality-35111997/

Who is next?
July 15, 2020

About a month ago there was an online petition “to remove the artwork of a local business owner John Sendelbach.”
The Recorder with all its exuberance, ran a front page article about the petition. Three days later the petition was taken down.
The morning of the article, I wrote the following and sent it to the editor of the Recorder. My letter never made it to print. I am trying again, to offer my support to Mr. Sendelbach and voice my opinion the matter.
June 12 I wrote: This newspaper is perpetuating division and exclusion.
A petitioner states, “I want my community to be represented in a positive and loving way.”
Hypocrisy!
Am I wrong?
How is calling out a person based on their skin color and gender, Mr. Sendelbach is a caucasian male, to publicly shame, ridicule and chastise him, threatening his business and livelihood, acting in “a positive and loving way”?
I think it is the exact opposite.
The petition group is using fascist techniques to silence and ostracize a person into submission.
Read between the lines how subtle they are to highlight a person’s skin color and gender.
Plain and simple a mob mentality: Encircle an individual, then shout them down, because they disagree with you.
If this type of mob think continues, where will it lead to? Who is next?
Jim Bates

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.

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.