Floored

In his current Facebook status, Greg Glover boasts, "If looks could kill ... you all would be lying on the floor."  I gotta give the man points for insight ... and no false modesty.  And of course he's plugging his tag team If Looks Could Kill (with partner Brian Nelson).

Despite my usual reservations about guys over age 19 wearing their baseball caps backwards or to the sides of their heads (the same reservations I have about grown women wearing jumpsuits with pink bunnies all over them), G2 is one of the hottest guys in wrestling.

He's got a boyish smile, a torso that's made for wearing warpaint, and biceps you could crack walnuts with.

He looks vaguely familiar to me.  In high school I knew a guy in Miami named Danny who had that tan and body.  Come to think of it, I knew two guys in Miami named Danny who had that body.   Apparently "Greg" is the 2010 equivalent of 1970s "Danny."  Or maybe all the Dannys back in South Florida still have that body.  But I (as I so often do ) digress ... inanely.

Still the familiarity is only vague.  I can't place the face, for instance, though it too seems eerily like something remembered from my past ... my long-ago past, before G2 was even a twinkle in some guy's roofie (I kid).  Just looking at photographs of him, I can smell the peanut butter on his breath.  Where does that association come from?

I also get a strong sensation of the heat rising off his chest and shoulders.  Maybe that's just wishful thinking ... or maybe it's a real recollection, a half memory, the ghost of a flashback to a stage of my life I let go of a long time ago (Note to those of you under age fifty:  This sort of thing happens as you age--you let go of things, deliberately or not, but something about them lags behind, hazy and out of focus in the mind).

Perhaps you have heard theories of attraction that involve the ways we are attracted to people via fetishes--literally "charms."   To some extent, our imaginations model new acquaintances (and the people we view through the mass media) according to the impressions others have made on us in previous stages of life; and when their eyes, their voices, their walk, their odor, their uniform, or even their activities (like wrestling) remind us of "lost" good times, we find ourselves "inexplicably" drawn to those people ... or, at any rate, to our fantasies of them.  So goes the theory, anyway.

Looks, then, can do a lot more than kill.  They can resurrect memories, they can trigger the imagination, they can excite.  And it is my contention, as I occasionally mention in this blog, that it is the cumulative impact of these factors which gives us our individuality and distinctive identity, which makes some of us like singlets and others of us like jockstraps.