Brian and Brian and....

(In a previous post I mentioned that I had written this one but had taken it down in case I hurt Brian's feelings. He saw that and of course demanded to read the possibly-offensive post, only he thought it was funny and said I should put it back. So here it is.)



I usually don’t use my blog to poke fun at my husband because I fear his retaliation. He’ll say some shit that isn’t even funny, just to get me back. Oh and it won’t be TRUE, either. Yeah. But in the case of what I am about to tell you, I simply feel that the world needs to know.

My husband’s name is Brian. Let’s call him, for the purposes of this post, Brian F. He has a friend whose name is also Brian; let’s call him Brian L. These two guys have odd things in common; things that make a normal person go Hmmm. The biggest and most obvious thing (aside from their names, of course) is that they love game shows. I don’t just mean that given a choice of several types of TV shows, they would choose a game show. I mean they LOVE them. They belong to internet discussion groups about them. They read books about them. They sit around watching old game shows on tape. They have the home games. They make scornful references to failed hosts and crappy sets and burned-out light bulbs on the Family Feud board. Their brains are crammed with game show trivia.

Their brains are also crammed with more general trivia. They’re both terribly observant about things that regular people (like ME) either don’t notice in the first place, or notice in passing but don’t retain for long. For instance, they can tell you who recorded every song known to man, and who wrote it, and what year it came out, and what label it was on, and what year it was re-recorded and why, and blah, blah, blah.

I tend to leave the house when Brian L comes over.

But if all this isn’t weird enough, allow me to share with you the other thing they have in common: They love empty stores. You know, like when a store goes out of business? And there’s nothing in there but some old crappy shelves and racks and some dust bunnies on the floor and old tape on the windows? That gives them a woody. They press their nerdy little noses against the glass of such places and say Wow. Remember when the creamed corn used to be right over there?
Right now you’re probably wondering, as I often do, what kind of a person gives a damn about old empty stores. I can report that Brian F says he thinks it has something to do with nostalgia for a bygone era. Well, now, I can see how it would be cool to wander through a closed-up amusement park or perhaps a school one had once attended. An old hospital might be interesting, or maybe a prison no longer being used, like Alcatraz. But a store you were just inside a couple weeks ago? I don’t get it.

They are not alone in their freakiness, however. In fact there is a whole website, oft-mentioned by the two Brians, called Dead Malls [dot] Com. It is the cyber-gathering place for those rare souls who get excited by the phenomena of closed retail establishments. I looked at it just now, as research for this post. And I learned that the guy it belongs to is named… BRIAN.

I can’t tell you how disturbing this is to me. What do you want to bet he likes game shows?