My gummy bears have turned into unrecognizable sickly yellow slime. As all evidence of their bearishness dissolves, somehow my guilt does too. Now it’s time for…cannibalism. Whatever will those Bacardi shots taste like? I’ll keep you posted, my fellow inebriates.
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.”
My Fellow Inebriates,
One of my Facebook friends posted this on my wall:
The Internet is full of good ideas, as anyone who’s ever researched a possible medical condition will attest. There aren’t too many better ideas than this one.
As it happened, four-year-old Miss V had a whole bunch of gummy bears, and there was a mostly empty bottle of Bacardi Big Apple languishing in the liquor cabinet. Perfect preschool activity, wouldn’t you say?
But first I had to ask the gummy bears what they thought of the idea.
They were totally cool with it, although the white one kept falling down, which made me think it was drunk already.
Even as I warned them about the hazards, the white one wasn’t listening.
V and I helped them line up. Look at that yellow one getting pushy.
At the top, the gummy bear hesitated. So V ate it.
He who hesitates is lost. V nabbed this one as well. She didn’t really think we were going to let them drop.
Nor did my mother. This was totally an accident (the kind that happens when you prop a 2-cm gummy bear across a 3-cm hole).
“Daddy’s not going to like that!” said V.
“Sure he will,” said my mum.
By now the other gummy bears were frantic with excitement.
V got busy. “Mummy, what’s this drink called? Mummy, does LB like it? Does he want to drink it?”
They look so happy in there. That bottle’s been in our cupboard for almost four years, helping no one. Now it’s a party bottle.
Kinda reminds me of this other bottle.
Liquorstore Bear 