Gummi Beards - FaceTime for your Mouth - 12 packs

• About 21 Gummi James Hardens per bag. 12 bags each order
• These beards are both sour and sweet. Whoa.

Hello there, reader. I am happy to share with you this sweet tale.

I never had many friends in elementary or middle school. Don't feel sad for me. Only the basics have a lot of friends in the 7th grade. My reason for being a social outcast? Most likely my bipolar tendencies and poor impulse control, my therapist says, before she hands me my prescription. When I was younger, I used to get my meds in gummi candy form. But now that I'm puberty-sized, a high school kid, no more.

I did have a couple of middle school friends who all had houses that smelled weird, I think that was what we had in common, and one kinda, sorta friend, Josh, that not too many kids or adults liked. Josh was the scariest and weirdest kid I ever met, and this includes my sister's boyfriend, Stuart, who lives and dresses like an Amish even though his Dad is a heart surgeon and they live in the rich neighborhood.

Anyway, anything Josh and I talked about always found its way back to him going on about serial killers. Example: In sixth grade we would compare our Pokémon, and then somehow it shifted to Jeffrey Dahmer because he tortured small animals as a child. I think Dahmer was his favorite. He talked about him more than Manson, or Bundy or even the Axeman of New Orleans. 

I had become more and more concerned with Josh’s mental state, which is saying a lot because I am fairly self-obsessed.  But I really believed that it’s not good to be thinking about serial killers all day. I know it’s bad for me to think about sleeping with my mom, but just like Josh, I can’t stop thinking about it. (To be clear, I also think about sleeping with my sister, my sister's boyfriend, the gym teacher, my mom's drinking buddy, my neighbor, that drive-through window girl at Fuzzy Taco, the actual taco itself, and of course, Miss Snow, the accompanist to the freshman boys' choir. But I have to wait in line to fantasize about her, as the whole freshman boys' choir thinks about her.) 

Back to Josh. One day he invited me over to see a movie he had rented called Cannibal Holocaust.  His foster parents were out of town for the weekend so we had the house to ourselves.  Now, I’m more of a wisecracking rom-com kind of guy, Sex and the City makes me laugh and cry every time -- and why can't there be a Gilmore Guys?  -- but I decided to watch this horror flick to make Josh happy.  There is so much blood and gore in that movie, just remembering it makes me sick.  About halfway through I look over at Josh and he’s laughing at it. He laughed at seeing people be torn apart and eaten alive. I’ll never forget what he said to me: “Are you having as much fun as I am?” No Josh, I was not.

So, after that nightmare fuel, we decided to take our Ritalin and go for a walk by the old sawmill. We lived in an older town so seeing or even exploring an old sawmill was perfectly normal.  Nothing horror-movie about it.

Neither was going into the place to go explore. I mean, it was filled with old beer cans, food wrappers and because teenage love is gross, a 2 foot pile of used condoms in the corner. Just as we went into the area where the wood used to be cut, the sawing area, Josh began punching me. Maybe it was the Ritalin, maybe it was an inner demon, I don’t know. But if you are even close to normal, if someone punches you, you tend to get upset. So I pushed him hard, and he stumbled,  fell backwards into an a old saw blade that was poking through the wall.

Goddamn, even old blades are sharp.

It cut right through his head, from the back of his head to right between his eyes. I’ll admit it; I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. If I went to the police, I would be arrested for murder. If I walked away, his foster parents would get a manhunt started and then it would be a matter of time before someone found his body.

The only thing that came to mind was the movie I had just watched. I had to eat him. It’s the only way to get rid of the evidence of foul play. So, I tried. I tried to eat him. Took a big bite.  But I couldn't.  Cannibalism is harder than you think! If that is one thing you get from this review, that should be it. Cannibalism is not easy.

I called the cops. I would accept my fate. While waiting, I found some of these James Harden bearded gummis in his pocket. They took the taste of Josh out of my mouth. 

The whole thing turned out pretty good. The cops and lawyers all agreed it was an accident. It was, and I was a little freaked out, I mean I was annoyed with Josh, but not enough to kill him. But I mean one kid dead. It's not like I'm the King of Syria or any person really messed up like that. Josh's foster parents didn't seem too sad. They were only into the foster parent thing for the money.  My parents stopped trying to force me to be normal. And because of my notoriety,  I got to fool around with my sister's boyfriend and the drive-through window girl. 

And these James Harden Gummi Beards are my go-to, post-sex snack now.

Using this apparently lemon gumdrop flavored rating system, I must give these candies 5 out of 5 Bezos, because they washed away the taste of dead Josh from my mouth!