Hey, it's Enrico Palazzo! And Disco Pirate Bunnies!

I think that commercials should be required to be a little less catchy.

I'm one of those people who thinks that commercials don't affect him, only I'm kidding myself-- we all are-- because they do. They affect me directly and do so a lot of times. No matter how much I tell myself that I'm not affected to advertising, there will always be the memory of the night that Sweetie and I were watching TV and saw an ad for a fast food restaurant that will go unnamed but which looked really really good and the next day we got up early and went there for breakfast. And I dreamed about it that night, too.

And commercials affect me indirectly, like this morning when I'm driving to work and find myself, for 30 minutes, singing the "credit union song" from the commercial that was playing when I started the car. Again, I won't name the company, but the song has a strumming acoustic guitar and a sort of Jack-Johnson-y singer. A guy who's not quite as likeable or funny seeming as the "Credit-Report Crab Shack" guy, who also has catchy songs but who gets downgraded for suggesting that he wouldn't marry his girlfriend because of poor credit. As a guy who owes a lot in student loans, I am very sensitive to people suggesting to Sweetie yet another reason why she might want to set her standards a little higher than me.

But the credit union guy has a good voice and sings:

"A home equity loan at [the name of the] credit union."

That's the only part I remember. So I drove to work today humming and singing that, and, after a while, that part of my brain that needs a lot more to do kicked in and does what it usually does: begins filling in homonyms.

Does anyone else have some kind of overactive brain that plays little games like this? My mind is constantly working on something that it shouldn't be. Like last week when I tried to take an alternate route home because the usual road home was all traffic-jammed up and as I was trying to remember where I was supposed to turn to get back onto my usual route, my mind instead decided to think of three other things:

1. The average speed in miles per hour I was getting versus what I usually get on the way home,
2. Whether I had my cellphone on vibrate or ring, and
3. Disco pirate bunnies.

Those last two were actually kind of important because, first, I didn't know if my phone was vibrating or if it was just my leg getting tired of hitting the clutch because of the stop and go traffic, and, second, the song "Disco Pirate Bunnies" from the show "Bunnytown" is about the coolest kids' song I've ever heard, and really, Disco Pirate Bunnies should have their own show.

Which is what I was thinking about when I missed my turn. I wasn't thinking about the Disco Pirate Bunnies this morning. My mind hadn't turned to that particular page yet, so instead of runnign the credit union song out of my head, my brain just started inserting words that rhymed but less sense, slowly warping the song:

a home equity zone at [the] credit union...
a loan equity poem at [the] credit union...
a perspective-y loan at [the] credit union...

And I was singing those periodically. Really, though, you've got to give my mind credit for that last one, right?

I have a cure for that song-running-through-your head thing, but I can't always use it. I can't use it at all, in fact, because it will be worse.

The cure for any song running through your head, as told to me by one of my friends once, is this: Hum The Star-Spangled Banner. It works, he said, because "The Star-Spangled Banner" has no tune and will drive all other tunes out of your head. Which would be great, except that the part of my mind I can't control and which will eventually be "Exhibit A" in Sweetie's divorce case, whenever I think of "The Star-Spangled Banner" immediately turns to the Naked Gun version of the song and all I can think of is Hey, it's Enrico Palazzo! and then I not only start laughing, but also insert that into the song:

An Enrico loan at [the] credit union...

So I would like it if you commercial writers out there would just stop being so good at it and turn your efforts to something else. Like creating that "Disco Pirate Bunny" spinoff.