Easily distracted, convinced their careers are eons away, teenagers are moving targets, difficult to track through college and beyond, they acknowledge.
Those long-ago times are enviable for their unpredictability -- eons removed from the scripted conventions that will soon be offered to the nation once more as lean cuisine for thought.
So for birds and frogs to keep nibbling on some leaf or mushroom that's killed their parents, for eons and eons until they eventually evolve to use the poison themselves that seems utterly impossible.
Its vast expanses of apparently arid land, often hermetic on the surface but teaming with life, have long fascinated the naturalist, for their dust contains eons of artifacts and clues to many of humanity's puzzles.
While escaping, Ray and Rachel are offered shelter by Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), who presumes that the aliens had buried their technology on Earth eons ago and that he and Ray can deduce their weaknesses by observing them, as their refuge is right in the middle of an alien camp.
He goes on to perform a couple of executions, meet a mysterious troupe of travelling players, escape underground man-apes who have mutated from their human origins through "eons of struggles in the dark" and take part in a cannibalistic ritual which confers the substance of a dead person's mind to the eater.
Zoo animals, dogs, feral pigs -- that's right, I said feral pigs -- feed and drink and multiply so capably one gets the impression we humans have been pretty much cramping their style all these eons).
Isolated, disjointed events would take place, only to be engulfed by an opaque black void, their relative meaning, their significance, annulled by the eons of entropic silence that estranged one from the next.
But, hopefully, the insurance population will never have to be used, hopefully these bizarre beings will continue swimming in their little mountaintop lake for eons to come, gobbling up whatever gets too close and beguiling us with their many chromosomes.
Their losses are precisely documented, from the minutiae of sole survivors to the patterns of extinctions of birds and their ancient relatives over the eons of geological time.
