I got a shock when I looked at my gummy bears this morning.

They were supposed to look happy and plumply saturated with rum.

But instead, they’d turned into goo.

Neither of my two brain cells had remembered my own posts about flavoring vodka with Skittles and Jolly Ranchers, a process in which those candies dissolve uniformly…

I felt sick.

It reminded me of Breaking Bad—meth-peddling thugs get liquefied in an acid bath after messing with the wrong dudes. Only my little bears weren’t thugs, and I was the wrong dude.

The horror.

My head was spinning. Holy shit, I’d done something ghastly to my little compatriots and there was no way they were coming back from it.

What would you do??

I had to get my head on straight.

I visited my friend Blackie Bear, not generally known for sensible advice, but comforting in a bearish way.

If he was shocked about the fate of the gummy bears he didn’t indicate it; he maintained a neutral expression as I poured out the story of their execution.

Blackie is a good listener.

Finally he said, “Bro, you can’t get upset about it. Gummy bears aren’t like us, buddy. They don’t feel. They’re not smart. They’re just…candy. You don’t think those gummy bears chose to dive into the Bacardi, do you?”

“No,” I said. “I gave them a pep talk first. And now they’re dead.”

Blackie was still for a while. Actually, he’s good at staying still. Sometimes he doesn’t move at all for days. He stared at me very hard for a long time before saying:

“Dude. Dude, those bears aren’t bears, they’re just candy. You can’t anthropomorphize them.”

I looked into Blackie’s dark, beady eyes, close-set in his smallish head. He is so cuddly, Blackie Bear. But as I peered at him I was overwhelmed by a troubling thought. Something inescapable rose in me like a scream. Blackie isn’t…he isn’t….Blackie isn’t really…he’s not a real…

He’s not a real psychiatrist. I mean, he doesn’t have any training or anything. I don’t even know where he learned the word “anthropomorphize.”