Staff Writer Anna Rosenbloom and Deputy Arts Editor Paula Carrión go on a 5 pm trip to JJ’s and realize that the real treasure is the gumballs they did not find along the way.

When you think JJ’s, you think of a very dimly lit room in the style of a sports bar, chicken tenders that may or may not give you food poisoning, and people stealing your chicken quesadillas. So when we heard that this semester JJ’s set up a gumball machine on top of one of their trash cans, we had to see it (and try it) for ourselves. This snack investigation (snackstigation?) was a job for two girls…

Us Bwoggers will go to great lengths for our posts. When we got to JJ’s, we found ourselves ingumsolable. There were no balls to be seen. We even had three whole human interactions where we asked some of the workers where the machine had gone. The answer? No one knew. And try as we might, we were not able to crack the eldritch secrets of candy transmutation to summon them anew. The gumballs were gone. Forever. Maybe (they didn’t really say if it would be back or not). They did point us to where the machine used to be—rip all the balls of gum that were lost or not eaten.

We wandered in silence. Eventually, we decided to chew on some leaves and telephone poles, but it just wasn’t the same. Still hungry, we had a chicken quesadilla (with mushrooms) and a vegan burger (which tasted suspiciously like a literal cow—it actually started screaming for mercy and everything). But we still had gumball-shaped holes in our hearts.

We made the only logical choice we could—in one of our failed transmutation machine prototypes, we had unlocked the secrets of teleportation, so we zapped our way to Mesoamerica and Nara Smith-ed chicle trees into raw gum. It tasted bad. JJ’s gumballs probably would have been way better. We zooped back home.

Finally, we had some Crunch ice cream—which is a thing, apparently—and left. All in all, it was a good study break, but we were still gumball-less.

Gumballs: 0/10 due to nonexistence.

All images via Authors