Ice…

It melts.

I hate that.
How did Hemingway and Thompson manage this problem, I wonder?
They did not strike me as the type of men who had waiters refreshing their tumbler, and let’s face it, before they were somebodies, they were on their own unless their many wives did the re-filling for them (must be nice to be a guy). Plus, I doubt ice cubes were very plentiful in war-torn countries for Ernest nor at the wet bar at a Hell’s Angel’s encampment for Hunter.
I swear, these dudes just had to keel over before they told us their secret. Maybe in the ravages of their later lives, “drinkies” became “neat”/sans “rocks” just so that particular problem would go away, alcoholics suffering writer’s block don’t need anymore stress than they already have, you know. The problem with that though is I’m kind of a “mixed” drink prose monster and how does anyone swallow a mixed hi-ball without ice???
Oh yeahhhh…that’s rrright…”some” people can…holy crapola, the demise of civilization as we know it.
I swear by all that’s literary holy, I make a cocktail with seven ice cubes (yesss, seven, okay, you have a problem with that?), I put it beside my keyboard and I begin to hack. What seems like only a few paragraphs later those seven are GONE, I say GONE, not even a hint that they were floating in my tumbler elixir in the first place…the loss, some nights, is barely bearable, you know.
When I’ve reached a hacking cookie break, it is time for my first slurp, and I have to endure what should be a zenith experience without the cubes that were intended as the zenith part of that experience…the sight, the sound, the whole liquid enchilada. It’s like Moses appearing on Mt. Sinai and only “claiming” he was given two Tablets by the BIG GUY, but that upon his return he tripped and they broke, that the Masses would just have to take his word for them. It’s enough for a hacker like me to commit suicide even before I become famous and have to!
If anyone, and I mean anyone, out there knows how to have a drink as you type and have ice cubes in that drink, when that drink is needed, please advise.
Ahhh shoot…they’re gone AGAIN…oh, the angst and the agony.