Igotmyeyeon YOU!

HBO's "John From Cincinnati" was canceled...



I was thinking about this when listening to a commercial for "LasikPlus Vision Center." The commercial offers, I swear to John's Father, $200.00 off Lasik eye surgery to the first 500 callers. Also, you pay nothing until 2009, and then you can pay interest free payments of just $48.00 a month. The part of me that wears contacts was thinking, awesome. The rest of me was thinking, what the hell, is this furniture or surgery? Like, dear Lord, is this the sort of establishment that did Tara Reid's plastic surgery? And then I had images of people with vision corrected eyes that, unfortunately, were no longer in the person's eye sockets. But, who knows, this place also has the experience of over 800,000 surgeries. (There is still the part of me that wears contacts thinking, eh, my eyeballs might not make it anyway, considering how often I sleep in my contacts; don't wanna be burning bridges.)

So, that train of thought led me to, "I got my eye on you, LasikPlus Vision Center!" (What kind of a name is LasikPlus? Don't surgeons usually name their practice after themselves, a saint, or a tree? What is the "plus" anyway? Hummel figurines? Elvis plates? The phone number, by the way, is something classy like "1-800-XXX-EYES." Swear to John's Father in Cincinnati.) And that reminded me that "John from Cincinnati" only made it through one season.

Maybe you never watched the show. That doesn't matter, because I watched every episode and it didn't matter, either. The show made as much sense as...well, about as much sense as the above line of reasoning. Maybe less. But it was still kind of great.

And it is no more. This makes me sad, because the show had lots of potential, sure, but mainly because there were so many one-liners that are now homeless.

"I got my eye on you!"

"There's some things I know, and some things I don't know."-------changed to "I don't know Butchie instead."

"Just took a dump a grown man would be proud of!"

"Look at the breasts on these women. This country is doomed."

I'm just saying, if I say, as I often do, "I don't know Butchie instead," people will look at me like I am a weirdo, as they often do, and if I say, by way of explanation, "You know, 'John from Cincinnati?'" they will not know. Maybe now, but not for much longer.

Bill, Vietnam Joe, Butchie, Palaka, Freddy, Ramon, Dickstein, John Monad, and the rest--well, mostly Bill and Co., but the rest too. Kai was cool. I didn't ever want to kill Shaunie. Linc.

Actually, everyone on the show was pretty cool, except Cass was boring, Mitch was annoying, and Cissy made my ears bleed.

Speaking off Cissy, and ads that transcend genres:

"Are you sitting in your kitchen on 7th street, thinking of blowing off your head with your gun you got back from Kai’s trailer? Have you completely run out of whatever let you put up with your asshole husband for 31 years…do you feel that everything you ever touched in your entire life, you turned to shit and mud?....Do you hurt so bad, you want it to just quit and be over? Everything? Well, let me tell you about our offer, Cissy. We prefer you don’t. We wish you wouldn’t. Our offer is: keep going, feeling just as miserable, or worse. Hold the gun under the spigot and turn the water on. Spare Shaun finding you dead in the kitchen. And as a bonus, you’ll also receive … his love. Act now, Cissy. Baptize that fucking pistol!"

Now, is that anti-suicide, or an ad for carpet cleaner?

Maybe the dude that wrote the LasikPlus ad was a fan of John, and was inspired by John's ability to turn an ad for carpet cleaner into something more meaningful. Maybe, in the spirit of John, we should let go off preconceptions about what things should be, and what things should sound like, and just let things be.

Maybe, or maybe me, the LasikPlus ad people, and most of John from Cincinnati, are full of shit. Or, maybe just LasikPlus. I'm putting my money on that one.