I’m undefeated against the hare, thought the tortoise. Actually, I’m 1–0—I’m undefeated in my entire racing career! How do you win a race? Slow and steady, that’s what they say, right? Well, I invented slow and steady. This is good. This will be good. One time could have been a fluke. Twice, there’ll be no question.
The race was set in ten days’ time. The tortoise set out to replicate what seemed to have worked the first time, which was nothing in particular: simple diet, some walking around. A little of this, a little of that. He didn’t want to overthink it. He was going to mainly just focus on being slow and steady.
The hare trained like no one had ever trained for anything. He ran fifteen miles every morning and fifteen every afternoon. He watched tapes of his old races. He slept eight hours every night, which is practically unheard of for a hare, and he did it all under a wall taped full of the mean, vicious things everyone had said about him in all the years since the legendary race that had ruined his life.
On the day of the race, the tortoise and hare met for the first time in five years at the starting line, and shared a brief, private conversation as their whole world watched.
“Good luck, hare,” said the tortoise, as casual as ever. “Whoa! You know what’s funny—do that again—huh, from this angle you look like a duck. Now you look like a hare again. Funny. Anyway, good luck, hare!”
“And good luck to you, tortoise,” whispered the hare, leaning in close. “And just so you know—nobody knows this, and if you tell anyone I said it, I’ll deny it—but I’m not really a hare. I’m a rabbit.”
This wasn’t true—the hare just said it to fuck with him.
“On your mark, get set, GO!”
There was a loud bang, and the tortoise and hare both took off from the starting line.
Never, in the history of competition—athletic or otherwise, human or otherwise, mythical or otherwise—has anyone ever kicked anyone’s ass by the order of magnitude that the hare kicked the ass of that goddamn fucking tortoise that afternoon.
Within seconds, the hare was in the lead by hundreds of yards. Within minutes, the hare had taken the lead by more than a mile. The tortoise crawled on, slow and steady, but as he became anxious at having lost sight of his competitor and panicked over what he seemed to have done to his legacy, he started speeding up: less slow, less steady. But it hardly mattered. Before long—less than twenty minutes after the seven-mile race had begun—word worked its way back to the beginning of the race that the hare had not only won the contest, and had not only recorded a time that was a personal best, but had also set world records not only for all hares but also for leporids and indeed for all mammals under twenty pounds. When news reached the tortoise, still essentially under the banner of the starting line, he fainted. “Oh, now he’s napping?! Isn’t that rich,” heckled a nearby goat, drunk on radish wine.
Those who didn’t know the context—who hadn’t heard about the first race—never realized what was so important about this one. “A tortoise raced a hare, and the hare won? Okay.” They didn’t understand the story, so they didn’t repeat it, and it never became known. But those who were there for both contests knew what was so special about what they had witnessed: slow and steady wins the race, till truth and talent claim their place.
Dark Matter
“And that’s the puzzling thing about dark matter,” said the scientist at the end of our planetarium tour. “It makes up over ninety percent of the universe, and yet nobody knows what it is!”
People on the tour chuckled politely, like Wow, isn’t that a fun fact?
But I looked closer at the scientist, and I could tell something from the smirky little smile on his fat smug face:
This motherfucker knew exactly what dark matter was.
“So as you look up at the skies tonight, I hope you have a little more perspective, knowing more about what we know—and don’t know—about our vast and magical …” etcetera etcetera.
Everyone clapped and the tour guide smiled that smug smile I mentioned before and waved goodbye without opening his fingers like the huge fat nerd that he was. Everyone else on the tour headed back to their cars, but I kind of sidled up to the scientist with quite a little fake smile of my own.
Two can play this game, fatso.
“Pretty interesting tour you gave there,” I said. “Lotta interesting facts.”
“I’m glad you had a good time!” he said with that smug smile again.
“Oh, I did, I did,” I lied. “In fact, I’d like to ask you something about Saturn.” I gestured to a dark corner of the hallway.
“Sure,” he said, still smiling at me and ignoring my pointing. “What would you like to know?”
“Over there, over there,” I said to the fat fuck, pointing to the dark corner. “Past by where the coats are. There’s a diorama of Saturn that I think is all fucked up. The rings and stuff. Come here. I want your expert opinion.”
“I can’t imagine they would have gotten the rings of Saturn wrong,” he said. “Oh, unless maybe you mean the mural at the entrance? The one for tots?”