More of the internet should be photos of Johnny Cueto playing with bubblegum

Johnny Cueto loves bubblegum, and we know this because whenever he blows up bubblegum, he looks like the happiest, most carefree child on Earth. I have reason to believe bubblegum is pretty much Johnny Cueto’s best friend, like the video game A Boy and His Blob, except the blob (the gum) doesn’t gain powers when you feed it jellybeans (you just end up mashing flavors.)

Johnny Cueto loves bubblegum so much, these are the last six things (as of writing) he posted on his Instagram account:

Five of these posts are literally Cueto and his bubblegum. You could take these posts as just Cueto being silly, but I choose to believe this is actually him transitioning his Instagram account into a database containing nothing but his bubblegum photos. Remember those days when you and your family looked at vacation photos in a binder or a wall projection?

This is Johnny Cueto’s version of that. These are his memoirs. Remember him not for his career as a pitcher in MLB, but for the love of his bubblegum.

The most beautiful bubblegum photo is the one where he wrote the perfect caption:

(Judging from the likes, I took a screenshot of that photo at a nice time.)

Social media can often be a mess. It can leave one demoralized and paralyzed from vitriol, encumbered with unnecessary garbage tweets that push people down instead of lifting them up. It can make people more cynical when they break away from their phones. It can make one feel more empty, and with the way things are going in the world these days, the feeling is exponential.

Somehow Johnny Cueto found the antidote to that; all he had to do was be himself. All he had to do was be silly and love bubblegum, his inanimate, expandable and flavorful best friend. If you somehow haven’t started following Cueto on Instagram, you should do that now. There are a lot of selfies and food photos, which are also pretty good, but you really want the bubblegum photos. That’s where pure joy lives.