Richard Armitage: Better than grapefruit

Setting the stage: yesterday I had one of those days experienced by many women during their reproductive years. (Don’t worry, that’s all I’m going to say about it.) Me, I’m always confused about my identity on days like that. Mostly because I have vehement feelings that seem so viscerally real. They’re not unusual in content — just oddly intense versions of things I think and perceive on normal days. To give a hypothetical example: on a normal day, I like grapefruit juice and drink a glass, usually cut with soda water, for breakfast. If I’m a bit stressed, my love of grapefruit might extend to a craving for grapefruit soda (Fresca, if I indulge, or maybe Blue Sky, if I’m feeling flush). But on a day like yesterday, I think that I’ll die in the morning if I don’t immediately down a quart of grapefruit juice straight, I make an extra trip to the grocery store to buy a gallon and discover no one sells it in that size, I wonder if that omission signals a sales opportunity going begging, and I slowly become convinced as the day wears on that the only possible future for me lies in grapefruit farming or citrus marketing and sales. I ponder what I’d have to do to become grapefruit’s Anita Bryant (minus the political opinions). Unfortunately, those feelings are never euphoric (to put it mildly). But then, as always, the tide breaks, and I think to myself, “who was that with the grapefruit? Surely not Servetus! Thank heavens I didn’t move my retirement money into that grapefruit stock opportunity.” The real puzzler is why, after thirty years of this, it’s always such a surprise when it happens, month after month after month.

Anyway.

That’s why I didn’t write anything under the picture I posted yesterday, beyond the caption. I wanted to. I wanted to write a paean to all things lovely, of which Armitage was lovely thing-in-chief. But I thought, “you are in the grip of your hormones again and you will regret having said anything you publish, which will be the rhetorical equivalent of having purchased a citrus orchard.” I was, quite literally, transfixed. Some of that has to be related to dopamine uptake, I suspect. I feel subconsciously lousy, and so looking at a picture over a long period of time, or again and again, delivers repeated hits to those pleasure receptors. In that sense, a photo of Richard Armitage is like grapefruit, but doesn’t give me sore lips. He is, indeed, frighteningly, breathtakingly: beautiful. Luminous, an adjective used by at least four commentators here before. Suffused with light — a particular comfort on an emotionally dark day.

The thing is that, unlike the grapefruit intake, this passion doesn’t wane. On the morning after, I’ll lay off the grapefruit for a few days, or return to my normal intake, but photos of Armitage have become a regular source of pleasure. It’s slowly becoming a second language for me. I know just which pictures I need to look at to articulate my feelings, or to make myself smile. (Love, for example, the montage at Richard Armitage Online and often that is sufficient to start off my day, especially the picture of Guy looking back over his right shoulder and the one of Dr. Alec Track looking over his left.) Sometimes I think I wouldn’t have to write anything here, either to process this reaction or to communicate it. I could just post two Lucases, a Gisborne, a Harry Kennedy and a Thornton and have done with it. To wit [Courtesy of Richard Armitage Central Gallery: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5:

The above would be a sort of “say it with Armitage” rebus for yesterday that read, approximately “need some friendly concern; should look closely to see what the problem is; once I’ve identified the problem I need to be forceful, as this feeling is irritating; you know, affection is really the answer after all; though I’d better make sure that my knee-jerk reactions aren’t getting the better of me.” Maybe I’m deluding myself, but I don’t think this would actually work with grapefruit, which is relatively personally unexpressive and stable in meaning. Can you even say, “I’m sad” with grapefruit? But if I developed a sufficiently complex semiotics of Armitage, I suspect, I could stop speaking altogether and just flash a series of pictures on the screen.

So I started prepared to make an emotional confession, but I guess I’m backing off. For today, anyway. At least until the next time this thing gets me in its grip.

Can’t help but mention, in closing, that I wonder whether Richard Armitage will ever be photographed with grapefruit. Servetus can dream, right?

~ by Servetus on January 26, 2011.