BRIC-A-BRAC: The Rodent and the Great Emancipator? They Miss You

This has been nagging at me for a while. It's time to get it out in the open. Ease my psychic burden once and for all.

It started innocently enough. The commercial opened with a sleepy man walking into a kitchen, where he finds Abraham Lincoln and a beaver sitting at the dinner table. Behind them, an aquanaut is doing the dishes.

The ad, for a sleep drug which shall go nameless because they're not paying me a dime to talk about this, is silly. Why is this guy dreaming about Lincoln and a beaver playing chess? Who knows? You're just supposed to take it on faith that all these things are floating through his head at night. Whatever. It's no neon butterfly soaring across America, dispensing slumber at every turn, but if they think it will sell beaucoups of sleeping pills, then more power to them. I even got a chuckle out of it. The guy apologizes to the figments of his imagination for not sleeping much, and Lincoln replies, "Hey, it's cool." Lincoln says "cool". I'm down with it.

Then I started seeing the bus ads. Empty fields, filled only with a forlorn Lincoln and beaver. A teeter-totter, empty on one side, Lincoln and beaver on the other. A motorcycle, with an abandoned 16th President and his dam-building companion stranded in the sidecar. (Evidently they couldn't get the aquanaut to commit to the print campaign.) And the only thing explaining these bizarre tableaux is a URL, conveying the cryptic message, "They Miss You."

I've seen the commercial. I know what they're trying to sell. I can't begin to fathom what someone who hasn't seen it is thinking. I know ads are getting really obscure these days. But these posters on the side of the el are so utterly devoid of context, all I can envision is brain-freezes throughout the city. They're just so freakin' weird. What should a person think when the train pulls up and there, on the side, is a despondent-looking Abraham Lincoln. Why Lincoln? Why a beaver? WHY?

(To make matters worse, I'm currently tryring to get through the very-compelling-but-exceedingly-long Team of Rivals, an account of the rise to power and presidency of, yes, Abraham Lincoln. So there I am, reading about how Lincoln is trying to compose his first inaugural address, and the Purple line to Evanston comes rolling by, and I look up to see Lincoln, visibly sighing as he holds one end of an unused jump rope. With the beaver on the opposite end. And they miss me. Very disconcerting.)

Personally, I have this additional level of confusion attached to the making of the ads. I'm imagining this guy getting the call from his agent, learning that he's going to be playing the part of Abraham Lincoln. Finally, all those years of acting classes and playing Editor Webb in countless community theater productions of Our Town and working as the assistant controller for the AAMCO Southwest Regional office are paying off. He's going to play the man who saved the Union. And then the agent goes on.

Abraham Lincoln. In a commercial for sleeping pills.

With a CGI beaver.

Saying, "Hey, it's cool."

How weird must this guy feel shooting the pictures for these ads? "Okay, Abe, just hold the jump rope, and look sad about the fact that the guy whose dreams you haunt isn't catching any z's tonight. Oh, and try not to drop the beaver." Or is the beaver even there? Is he completely CGI? Does Lincoln have to stand there all by himself? Is he method? Is he picturing his little co-star being there?

There are a lot of perplexing ads battling for my attention these days. I don't know if I'm more puzzled by the SUV commercial that depicts a divorced dad getting to spend an extra weekend with his kids or the spot that uses images of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the World Trade Center Towers of Light memorial to sell trucks. There are multiple commercials involving cars getting into massive traffic accidents. Hardly a day has gone by in the past five years where I haven't seen a Geico ad. Madison Avenue has a lot to answer for. So it's a real tribute to these damn sleep aid commercials that they've managed to cut through the clutter and emerge as the weirdest ads around.

I think I'm losing more sleep because of these ads.