Ron Riekki
Numbers (Apocrypha)

The Lord spoke to Moses in the tent of meeting in the Desert of Sinai on the first day of the second month of the second year after the Israelites came out of Egypt. The Lord said: "Take a census of the whole Israelite community by their clans and families, listing every man by name, one by one. You and Aaron are to count according to their divisions all the men in Israel who are twenty years old or more and able to serve in the army. One man

from each tribe, each of them the head of his family, is to help you. These are the names of the men who are to assist you: Mark Twain, your cousin Jimmy, the inventor of string theory, Elvis (Costello, Mitchell, and Presley), that Christian girl who broke your soul, anyone from the Upper East Side,

Richard M. Nixon, Paul Newman, NSA members who install cameras in mosques, the people who died on the helicopter on Skaggs Island, Fritz Lang, the girls at the party who sexually abused you, Peyton Manning,

anyone involved with the Middle Ages, Jonathan Johnson, sad-faced concession stand workers, Kim Jong-Il, Alexis Texas, the personification of Mount Kilimanjaro,

Jesus, Thomas "The Jeff" Jefferson, gun owners, Harlem Globetrotters, Galileo Galilei, Betty Friedan,

John Wayne (including Gacy), the illiterate, prairie dogs

(of every sort), Carl Sagan,

Leonardo Pisano Bigollo,

you and

me.

Amen."