(Lizard on my patio, JMN, photo)
In ‘09 I had congestive heart failure. Good medicine and doctoring fixed it. Over time my ejection fraction rebounded from fifteen (bad) to sixty (normal).
Since ‘10 an appliance that looks like a Zippo lighter rides subcutaneously near my left collarbone — a pacemaker/defibrillator. Three wires snake from it down through a vein to respective sides of my heart (many people need two wires, I need three). They make it beat nice and symmetrical. My cardiologist said, “We’re making your heart more efficient.” Right on.
The gadget has paced me transparently out of a couple of minor arrhythmia episodes I didn’t even know were happening. It has never had to deliver a shock. Knock on wood.
(Andrew, JMN, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in. (C) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
This brings me to my dear neighbor who killed a snake in her yard yesterday. It was fat. She makes a circle with her indices and thumbs: This big. She didn’t know if it was poisonous or not. Who wants to find out? What if it bit one of the pet goats? Or the German shepherd? It lay in a puddle near the gate to the animals’ enclosure, latent with menace. It could’ve been dangerous, who knows? Best kill it.
And that brings me to the dairy farmers in Wisconsin who are contemplating having to slaughter portions of their herd because of a milk glut. “You can’t turn off the cows,” they say. Actually, if you kill a milk cow you’ve indeed turned her off.
In the continuum I inhabit with fellow creatures, I’m lucky to be a member of the species that decides what life is given and what life is taken. That’s as close as I can come at the moment to diluting sadness with celebration.
(C) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.
EthicalDative 
Postscript to “A Modest Proposal”
Law West of the Pecos, Tom Jones drawing.
When I still used Facebook I put up a version of the nonsense I’ve blogged here as “A Modest Proposal” (with nod to Jonathan Swift). A Modest Proposal At the time, a bill to foment the sale of silencers was before Congress. I don’t know where the matter stands at present.
From out of the blue, a gentleman appeared in the FB comment section. He informed me that the efficacy of silencers was greatly exaggerated in the movies. They did not, he said, suppress the report and flash of a firearm to the extent portrayed. He concluded that it was right and proper for gun enthusiasts to have greater access to silencers in order to protect their hearing.
I thanked him as neutrally as I could for his feedback. I haven’t the fortitude to cross swords with Second Amendment crusaders. I surmised there might be a contingent of them who monitor social media in order to catch and rebut messages possibly adverse to their cause. Had he taken my FB post seriously? How had I even come to his attention? Who knows? The man disappeared as abruptly as he had surfaced.
The point is, the argument I put forth there, as well as here in “A Modest Proposal,” is the sheerest of sheer nonsense — as much so as Swift’s satirical claim that one-year-old children of the poor could be “delicious nourishing and wholesome food.”
Silencers? I’m not brave. I shun confrontation. Oblique satire is the only refuge I have against what I consider to be arrant folly.
(C) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.