Congratulations on Burning This Fucker to the Ground!

You’ll be there in front of her on one knee, palm extended upward, the nearly empty box like a promise. You won’t be able to meet her eyes, your face turned down. You’ll chew your lip a little for a minute or two before you look up at her. She’ll be smiling, a frail frightened and shocked thing, and there will be tears in her eyes. When she answers it will come as a whisper.

“Yes.”

You’ll leap up to your feet, hefting the bottle of Cuervo Gold into the air and shouting.

“WOOOOO!”

She’ll leap up and wrap her arms around you.

“WOOOOO!” she’ll shout as you split apart to open the tequila.

You won’t bother with glasses, gulping off the mouth of the bottle like men dying of thirst in a desert. It won’t take long, no more than a handful of gulps before liquor begins to run its course through your body, seeping into your hands and crawling gently up your spine into the base of your brain.

It won’t be long before the evening turns to frenzied, drunken lovemaking on the floor of your apartment. This will, in turn, lead to premature ejaculation which will lead to more tequila. Then the two of you, hugging and smiling and drunk as a pair of Irish Mexicans, will decide to commemorate this great event in a way that the entire neighborhood will never forget. You’ll torch the place for insurance money.

Even drunk you’ll be smart about it. You’ll pack up your laptops and put an iron into a pile of gas soaked rags in your kitchen. Then you’ll spray acetylene all over the walls and plug the coffee maker in, making sure that there are some matches pressed up against the heating surface of the iron for good measure. You’ll also fashion a makeshift fuse out of a piece of string, also soaked in gas, and lead it towards the pile of rags. Then you’ll turn the iron on and stumble to a 24 hour coffee shop to “work on your novels together.” Mostly you’ll just make out while bored baristas watch.

It’ll be a foolproof plan. Six months later you’ll be rich as fuck with a bunch of new shit in a way swanker apartment in a much better neighborhood. Also you’ll have a kid (part of one, anyhow, growing within your wife) and a real job, no longer doing “contract computer repair work,” whatever that is. And no one will ever be the wiser.

Congratulations on Burning This Fucker to the Ground!