“Whooooooooooooooooo!!!” the race car driver shouted entering the dark tavern, holding his hands up and his fingers in the air like Richard Nixon used to do. He had a bikini-clad woman on each arm with painted on corporate logos carrying oversized bottles of expensive champagne. The race car driver was still wearing his helmet, although he flipped up the sun guard so his face could be seen, and was wearing the brightly colored jumpsuit emboldened with just about every corporate logo there was real estate for. “I just won the Indianapolis 500! Racing in circles for eight hours didn’t make me dizzy, it just made me drive faster! No one could catch me! But yeehaw there were a lot of wrecks. Oh hell, I caused most of them to win and win I did, something big.”

“Race cars?” a man at the bar barked back. He wore a flight jacket and aviator sunglasses. “That ain’t no race if you get to stay on the, stopping every lap to get new tires and gas and a nice iced tea with a straw,” the pilot said. “Try the Reno Air races, flying at five hundred miles an hour three hundred feet above the ground. Why, our propellers spin so fast, the edges break the sound barrier.”

“Propellers? That ain’t no race,” the astronaut argued with a voice that sounded like it came out of a mono radio speaker. He was inside a fully decked-out space suit, complete with oxygen backpack, handheld air conditioner with a hose into the suit, and the giant white helmet that seemed to always reflect an image of the Earth. The thick gloves made it difficult to hold his pint glass. “Sit in a tin can with a few oxygen tanks bolted on and get blasted into space on top of a giant rocket filled with a million gallons of liquid high explosives, racing the Russians to the moon. Now that’s a race. Maybe on a bad day your batteries would explode and the race is on for the boys in Houston to figure out a way to slingshot what’s left of your capsule around the moon and back into the Pacific Ocean before you suffocate or freeze to death. Now that’s a race.”

“Your concept of competition is pathetic, human!” the gray aliens in the corner drinking Shirley Temples objected. “A real race is spinning your flying saucer for twenty laps around a supermassive black hole. The gravity well is so great and the time dilatation is so repressive, you cannot use the warp drive at all. You have to use the backup projected plasma pulse drive, and we all know how radioactive that can be. And if you do not circumnavigate precisely, you’ll either get sucked into the event horizon or you’ll run out of fissionables and meet the same fate. It was 10,000 years later after we won that race and there was no glory, no prizes, no flowery necklaces or graffitied women hanging on our every word.”

“You ... are ... all ...wrong...” the man in the dark corner droned, too exhausted to even take a sip out of his beer. He had bags under his bloodshot eyes, and could barely lift his head off the table. “Try a race of endurance that lasts over two weeks where everyday you have to sprint like a madman, drawing every ounce of creativity from your soul just to survive until the next day, battling geniuses every step along the way. You never know what insanity you’ll be faced with until she posts the picture prompt, and you are judged mercilessly everyday. But in the end, after saying goodbye to all those that have fallen, it is a victory just to have finished. You jackwagons don’t know what competition is until you go 15 for 15. Wake me up in a month.”