We are all coming apart slowly and piece by piece.

It's like ashes to ashes stuff. Every time I pull my clothes out of the dryer I see that the lint is the dead skin of my wardrobe. My clothes are falling apart.

This morning my TV was stuck on an infomercial for a portable dermabrasion machine that grinds off dead skin and makes us young again. The remote was out of reach and I was reading about the death of Mickey Spillane.

My friend David was the first to let me know.

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman:
Private Joker!

Private Joker:
Sir, yes, sir!

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman:
Forty-two twelve, basic military journalism. You gotta be shitting me! You think you're Mickey Spillane? You think you're some kind of fucking writer?

Private Joker:
Sir, I wrote for my high-school newspaper, sir!

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman:
Jesus H. Christ, Joker! You're not a writer, you're a killer!

Private Joker:
A killer, yes sir!

Stanley Kubrick loved Spillane.

When I was a kid my mom got all his books. She love him! I remember seeing a picture she had of him signing her book at Woolworths or Ben Franklin 5 and Dime and there being ONLY women in the crowd at the signing. I didn't understand it. Women loved this guy that looked like the P.E. Teacher I hated.

I've read other filmmakers who say they learned to edit their films from reading how Mickey Spillane composed a sentence. Soon he will be decomposing.

Life is just some weird soup that churns. We live, we create, we die, we are worm food, worms die, they become absorbed by a vegetable, that ear of corn is eaten, we are absorbed by the eater, one day he dreams about us not knowing who we are.

We are become lint.

DNA flakes off us in clouds that linger in the air like secondhand cigarette smoke that traces a stairway to the stars. We inhale germs and dreams.