So one of the books I’m currently reading is Dean Karnazes’s autobiography, Ultramarathon Man. Karnazes is, as the title suggests, a well-known athlete in a particular field (or at least he was at one time … I don’t really follow the charts) in that particular sport (an ultramarathon is in practice any race longer than a 26.2 mile marathon, though the real events are the fifty-milers and hundred-milers).

Yeah, people do that.

I mean, I love running, but there are limits.

Anyway.

It’s 10:30, I’m in bed reading, about thirty pages in. He’s detailing the end of an ultramarathon he ran, where his wife and kids met him and picked him up in their van. His kids, Nicholas and Alexandria.

And I stop. Sit up straight. Read it again. Wake my wife up to make her read it. (She isn’t impressed — she has to work in the morning.) I read it again. I marvel at the bizarre world we live in.

Those are my kids’ names, with a single letter difference between the two of them.

This is a hell of a coincidence, but as Sherlock teaches us, the universe is rarely so lazy. No, this is kismet of the cosmic sort. There is some common thread, some replicated section in our DNA, which has caused both Dean and myself to love running and to give our kids the same names.

Or maybe the commonality is with our wives. Probably we both have really smart wives.

Whatever. It’s weird and freaky and awesome.

*Burrows back into his book-hole*