The First Day of Your Real Job

How to become an Ink Maker

“…you know, when we sit down to make work we are made of all the things we have consumed.” —Teju Cole in an interview with Khalid Warsame for Lithub

Even far from school, September always feels like the beginning of new year and just as importantly, the end of an old one. I can’t help looking back because my computer is dying, and while backing it up I found this series of images from my kitchen counter from the day of the very last film shoot for The Color of Ink.

On paper, in that scene, there was a coming together of the medicinal, the personal, and the what maybe could be called the superworldly, and I hope there will be something in the scene that will resonate. You might even feel a part of what I was feeling in that moment: a Dr. Frankenstein-what-have-I-done sensation co-mingled with a growing awareness that even in all their weirdness things are going in the way they are supposed to go. I wonder if you have ever felt this, dear reader. Somehow, I picture people who are good at sports feel this feeling all the time, maybe computer programers too, a kind of expertise in their mind, body and spirit. Or maybe put more succinctly, I did my job today.

It’s just that my job involves ordering lab supplies, historical medications now banned in my country, and the dust left over from the bronze casting of leaf that was made for me to give to Teju Cole for a poem he read at a church one early morning at Harvard, and something that came in a ziplock bag from my tree-farmer ex-stepmother in Hawaii, and Paul McCartney’s solo album with the cherries on it, and the baby in the sheepskin jacket, and the whispering of a dream of a whole chorus of bacteria and golden cup that emerged from the clouds of the Tarot and my ongoing YouTube fascination of a kind of pottery work made from tobacco juice meeting a kind of wet clay.

I have to leave you hanging about what exactly all that looked like (other than the slightly inscrutable pictures included here) because I want you to go see the film. And I should mention if you are in Canada it is now free to stream on the NFB’s site without ads (Please watch it, please share!). But the question that comes out of all of this for me right now is: how did I get here? Over the course of the film I kept being asked if I’d collected pens as I child or loved doodling or loved ink. And I’ve wracked my brain to find the truest answer to this. Lots of times in this newsletter. How I became an inkmaker. It’s a question that doesn’t go away. How does one become an inkmaker?

I remember so clearly the feeling I had on the first day of The Hard-to-get-into University that was not the university that I actually wanted to go to.

I remember they made you pick a major on the very first day …