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
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’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.
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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.
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.
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 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 ~ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
