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.

ANNETTE SZPILA, is a healthcare professional whose own field is built on a principle she never once extended to me.

Here I sit, on day six at Baystate Springfield. Cardioversion failed. My atrial fibrillation persists, and more complicated measures now appear to be in my near future. “There’s a quiet in the chest before the storm comes down.” I wrote that line for a song this year. I learned it the hard way. For six years, my heart has kept the record this town refused to keep.

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.

Finding My Mind or: where the soul actually lives, once you go looking for it

Somebody sends you the video. You've seen it, or one just like it — a kid, maybe fifteen, playing Sultans of Swing on a guitar, and not just the chords, the whole thing, the melody and the leads braided together, the Knopfler runs clean as water, and the caption underneath says something like: this is why AI will never have soul.

We've All Been Lied To By the Cereal Box ©2026 John F Sendelbach

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

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. 

Dear Randi Weingarten: THE CHILD STILL HAS TO READ THE PARAGRAPH

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.

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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.

BURNING MAN The Ash Economy: A New England maker follows the fuel ©2026 John F Sendelbach

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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.

The Unattended Loop: On History, Harm, and the Only Signal That Enters

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.

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

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 is not a civic letter. It is a compiled record. I am the man they tried to turn into a ghost, and I am still holding the paper.

Two dockets first, so nobody can pretend the rest is atmosphere: Commonwealth v. Catherine Hennessey, 2641CR0158; Commonwealth v. Henry W. Batteau, 2641CR0159. Northwestern District Attorney letterhead. Jaime Baker, Victim/Witness. Judge William Mazanec, Greenfield District Court, July 28, 2026. Both submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on assault and battery. Both walked out on a six-month continuance without a finding and a fifty-yard stay-away. Hennessey separately had malicious destruction of property under $1,200 continued generally under G.L. c. 276, § 87, on a not-guilty plea, with $429.99 restitution — the phone in the Deerfield, priced. That is the statute. That is not a slogan.

What follows is first person because I was there. A narrative is not evidence of the events it describes. A letter from the District Attorney is. A September 2024 eviction demand to a landlord is. A Facebook comment edited three times in twenty-four hours is. Where I am remembering, I will say so. Where I am inferring, I will say that too.

TEMPORARILY ELSEWHERE

Are All Cops Bastards? ©2026 John F Sendelbach

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.