THE GREAT AMERICAN COMPLIANCE MACHINE

How Common Sense Became a Regulatory Offense

There is a subtle, creeping madness to living in modern society, and if you pay close attention, you can feel the exact moment the trap springs shut. It does not happen with tanks in the street or dramatic proclamations of authoritarian decree; it arrives quietly in an HR office, at a university intake counter, on a municipal sports field, or behind a slick corporate dashboard, wrapped in the soothing, paternalistic language of empathy, scientific authority, and moral progress,right up until you make the fatal mistake of asking a single, obvious question, at which point you discover that exercising basic common sense is a fast track to social and economic erasure. We have built a Kafkaesque compliance engine out of thin air, and its most impressive psychological trick is convincing an entire civilization to bow down before concepts that violate basic observation, biological reality, and thousands of years of human experience, all while assuring us that our discomfort is simply proof of our moral inadequacy.

The Company Store in Your Pocket: How We Learned to Pay More, Get Less, and Wait for Our Own Money

There is something deeply peculiar happening in the American economy, and I don't think we've quite figured out how to describe it. We're paying more, getting less, waiting longer, and being told that everything is better than it used to be. The packaging is prettier, the technology is more sophisticated, the apps are slicker, and the corporations have developed an almost supernatural ability to make ordinary transactions happen instantaneously when they're collecting our money. But when it comes time to give us something back, suddenly we're expected to exercise patience, understanding, and a profound appreciation for the delicate complexities of modern commerce. Somewhere along the way, we've arrived at an economic arrangement in which the consumer is increasingly expected to accommodate the convenience of the corporation rather than the other way around.

AGRESSIVE RACISTS: Piyali Summer, Catherine Hennessey and Alouette Batteau

Piyali Summer was one of the people who assaulted me on june 6, 2020. tonite i let her see the video of it on facebook, since she popped up in my potential friends list, and asked her to admit it....instead she blocked me. not before i screen shotted it. this shows consciousness of guilt, thanks piyali for being a coward.

Below is the video, she is the overweight one with a hat that enters at 1:41, then locks elbows with hennessey, who is currently on probation for assault and battery on me 5 years later.

this falsely framed video destroyed my career, and piyali summer was a co-agressor with the psychos who ran the defamation campaign.

THE KINDER, GENTLER JOHNNYBITCHES

Some of you know Johnnybitches. I created him at a time when I had pretty much nobody else to talk to, so I started talking to a camera. Sometimes it’s me in the car, venting about whatever got under my skin that day. Sometimes it’s a walk-and-talk, pointing out the latest municipal construction failure. That guy is real, and he isn’t going anywhere. But life is about balance, and you can’t spend every day complaining, so yesterday I took a different kind of walk. I went across the Bridge of Flowers, through the village and down to the potholes, and talked about the good stuff. The video is in the comments. When YouTube picked a thumbnail out of thirty-four minutes of footage, it skipped the bridge, the river and my face and chose a lamp glowing in a shop window: a copper sphere with hands reaching out of it, lit up from inside. I’ll tell you about that lamp further down. For now I’ll just say I couldn’t have picked a better cover myself. This is the written companion, because some things come out better on the page than on the move.

Syrup or Powder: Alinsky, the Left-Right Machine, and Why I Don’t Vote

 Syrup or Powder: Alinsky, the Left-Right Machine, and Why I Don’t Vote

A.I. Slopworth ~ 2026

Hershey’s syrup or Nestlé’s Quik. Coke or Pepsi. Marlboro or Camel. Budweiser or Miller. Skoal or Copenhagen. McDonald’s or Burger King. Red Bull or Monster. Visa or Mastercard. Powerball or Mega Millions. Fox or CNN.

Every one of those pairs has produced lifelong loyalists, people who’d argue at a holiday dinner, mock the other side’s choice and feel faintly superior about their own. I grew up in a neighborhood divided over chocolate milk. Some kids were Hershey’s people, squeezing the brown bottle until the glass looked like a mudslide. Others swore by Quik, spooning in the powder and chasing the clumps around with a spoon. Nobody ever checked the label, because if they had, they’d have found sugar first, then more sugar, with a little cocoa for flavor. The pairs aren’t all identical, and they don’t all do the same kind of damage. But in each case the loyalty runs far deeper than the difference. In blind taste tests many cola loyalists can’t reliably tell their brand from the other. Both cigarettes kill you. Both lotteries are rigged against you by design. Both credit cards run on debt, and both cable networks make money by keeping their viewers angry and coming back. What’s really for sale in each case isn’t the product. It’s the loyalty. The brand loyalty is the product, and the harm is the business.

Chimera in the Hallway

The boy in the picture is me, somewhere around kindergarten, in a yellow shirt and a fringed vest my mother must have been proud of. Look at the teeth. Every kid on my street did. By the time that photo was taken the neighborhood had already gone to work on me, and the names came in a steady rotation: Teeth. Sabertooth. Bucky. Bucky Beaver. Lips, because the teeth pushed my lips out and made them look bigger than they were. There was even a whole routine about my birth. I came into the world in a red Valiant parked out in front of the hospital, a family story that should have been mine to tell, and the neighborhood turned it into a joke that the doctor had caught me by the lip. There were more names than those. Some I've honestly forgotten. One I never will.

THE RIVER DID NOT GET THE RECORD

 THE RIVER DID NOT GET THE RECORD

Six Years in Shelburne Falls, 2020–2026

By John F. Sendelbach

(this is a work in progress)

PROLOGUE — ONE QUESTION

I am going to tell the whole thing in one continuous line, because for six years I have been handed it in pieces by people who each only ever had to look at their own piece. The people who started it only had to see the version that flattered them. The officers who processed the complaints only had to see the report on the desk that day. The editors only had to see the petition count. The committee members only had to see the Zoom agenda. The judges only had to see the slice that reached their bench. Each of them got to walk away after their fragment. I never got to walk away. The whole sequence stayed in my head, in my body, and in a heart that now keeps time with every new insult like a second clock. So here it is, whole.

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.

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.

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.

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.