Peyton Manning

If Tom Brady is the kind of psychopath who looks like he once stood on the edge of a frozen lake, and stared absently into the distance, while the ice broke beneath another person's feet, and they were dragged, screaming, beneath the dark water, Peyton Manning is something else.

He's seems more like a guy who grew up in a small town, and stayed, while still managing to become a success. Sure, he inherited his dad's small bank, and the money that went with it, but he made the most out of that slight head start and reinvested it in the community, starting many local businesses. He's the one who brought the KFC into town.

Everyone loves the guy, but he's always rubbed you wrong. Something was just off whenever you saw him, left you cold when he smiled. Maybe it was real danger that you felt all along, you can say that now, but at the time it seemed more inexplicable.  Either you thought he was too calculating, or he was too boring, but for some reason he didn't match up with the way that you valued the world and what was good within it.  You knew somehow that he wasn't going to be on the side of whatever you wanted the world to become.

Then one morning you wake up and turn on the news and old Peyton's there, getting led away in handcuffs.  For some god awful crime, he poisoned old people or children, or he's been dabbling in human smuggling, and you feel slightly vindicated, but, just as his head is about to disappear into the cop car, he turns and looks at the camera with that bland expression on his face, and his giant forehead, and you see it all for the first time.

The fear, the calculating terror and menace that's lived right at the heart of your local universe for all these years, how every major tragedy seemed to combine itself with what was least unusual and most numbingly routine in the day to day lives of you and your neighbours, the bankruptcies, the early deaths, and suicides, and breakdowns, and runaways.  The decline of any real spontaneity or hope for change, the roads being paved in the summer and cleared in the winter. Its not that the blandness and monotony hid what was evil around you, its that it was of a piece with it.  It was the same force motivating each separate event, and the same man with his hand moving all the peices to the same outcome, thanks to his relentless and unstoppable calculation. You see all this on his face, and he knows that you see it, and you see that too, and for a long time you can't stop yourself from shuddering.

That's what Peyton Manning looks like.