Every high school has its Romeo and Juliet, one tragic couple. So does every generation.

I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

Marla tells me how in the wild you don't see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren't meant to get old. Marla lies down on her bed and undoes the tie on her bathrobe, and says our culture has made death something wrong. Old animals should be an unnatural exception. Freaks.

I like to get people moving and jumping. I think it's good to add more emotion and chaos.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.