1. Walk the earth for a while a-lookin' for a mate. Pick you a good, thick, hairy one with lotsa sap.
2. Throw him/her in the bed and make sure they heat up real good under the covers.
3. Get hitched.
4. Lead 'em on for a while, telling 'em you're going to work at your high-paying job for a long time and bring in plenty of cash.
5. Quit the job. (tee-hee!)
6. Take up the thankless low-pay hobby of writing.
7. Even after it is apparent that the writing will frustrate the hell out of you, pay you next to nothing and make you half crazy, keep doing it.
8. Despite the fact that you have no real job to speak of (and your spouse works all day), do no cooking, cleaning or chores while your spouse is at work. Instead, just keep writing tons of
useless crap!
9. Allow the writing to become so important in your mind that it starts to wake you up at night.
10. Allow the writing to become so important in your mind that it starts to keep you up at night.
11. Allow the
useless writing to become so important in your mind that you get up out of your soft comfortable warm bed in the middle of the night to go write it all down, effectively abandoning sleeping spouse.
12. Pay no attention to the fact that the house is heated to just 52 degrees between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. because you quit your real job and have no money to speak of. Just keep writing!
13. Allow your body to freeze solid while you idiotically type away, digits spider-like before the ghostly glow of your computer screen.
14. As the minutes of the wee morning tick away, take note of the creeping urge to sleep as it eventually increases and threatens to overcome your need to continue writing useless crap.
15. Turn off computer when the toothpicks that are propping your eyelids open snap in two and surface temperature of flesh is at or below the ambient temperature of 52 degrees.
16. Creep with stealth back into bedroom where warm, furry spouse is sleeping blissfully.
17. Smirk.
18. Crawl beneath covers, spending no time on your side of the bed, but instead moving directly to spouse's side of the bed.
19. While imagining you are a multi-legged sea creature surfacing from the murky-depths, completely insinuate your frozen self around toasty spouse.*
*Spouse usually wakes at this juncture in the procedure.
20. Take good care to find warmest places on spouse and, in those places, nuzzle coldest parts of self.
21. Purr.
22. Ask spouse, "Was it worth it?"
23. Interpret his/her angry grumbled response in any self-authored, self-serving delusional way you see fit.
