How Terrible Time is to an Artist

Unicellular organisms appeared on earth.  That was last September.  Not much else happened until around the end of June, when all of a sudden the oceans were just teeming with trilobites and other arthropods.  Near the middle of July, animals appeared on land for the first time.  Centipedes, mostly, with a few arachnids thrown in for variety.  The first week of August there were actual amphibians and reptiles on land, some as big as eight inches long.  A couple of weeks later and there were dinosaurs like the diplodocus which could be a hundred feet long.  The diplodocus, though, only hung around from about 7:00 to 8:00 AM on August 20.  On Labor Day the Tyrannosaurus appeared, and it seemed like a really big deal, but it hung in even less time than the diplodocus, about twenty-five minutes.  Last Tuesday you probably noticed all those mammals that were suddenly everywhere.  That was the paleogene period.  Sometime late Thursday night, there were primates.  Just before I woke up this morning, there were humans.  A minute ago, someone painted some bison and what-not on a cave in France.  Six seconds ago Homer wrote the Odyssey.

We say Homer is one of the immortals.