Beach poker

Coincidence level: 2/10 Category: Funny / charming / cute

I decided to take an Uber to a beach workout in LA with people I’d never met before. I found out about the workout because they were a part of a global group of avid runners – a group that I had worked out with when I’d been living in Barcelona.

And how did I connect with this group in Barcelona? Funny story there – I met a girl in a pole dance class who invited me to run a 5K with her the next day, and spontaneously, I did. From there I’d also meet a couple other good friends, one of whom was a handsome Italian chef who took me on his motorbike all the way to Tibidabo, an amusement park with a beautiful view atop the city.

Mirroring such a grand ferris wheel was the one on Santa Monica pier, and the Los Angeles workout group was located just a few blocks south.

Inside the Uber, on the way to the workout, I had been writing notes in my phone about ideas for my novel development. One such idea was that I would create an interactive page with four chapters, and the reader could pick the order in which he/she wanted to read the chapters. The chapters would all appear on one page and be represented by cards: The Queen of Hearts, the Jack of Diamonds, The King of Clubs, and the Ace of Spades.

I wrote this literally in the car, on the way to the workout.

When I arrived, the woman leading the beach workout had a deck of cards. “Here are the rules,” she said: “I’m going to pull out cards from this deck, and each suit represents the exercise – so if I pull a 7 of Hearts, then we do seven push-ups. If I pull a 3 of Spades, we do 3 V-ups, and so on.”

Very random and a very quickly synchronous card connection (especially for a running group that to my knowledge had never used any deck of cards in any workout that I’d done in Barcelona).

But it did make me smile.

. . .