During one of my last lockdowns at home alone, I watched The Wolf of Wall Street for the third or fourth time and became obsessed with the scene at the end of the movie. An allegedly refurbished Jordan Belfort is presented to a crowd of would-be tycoons eager for advice from the bad boy of quick fortunes.
Belfort, convincingly played by Leonardo DiCaprio, takes the stage in an unbuttoned dress shirt and new blue jeans to a round of applause. He stops, sighs, and studies the room like a starving carnivore, examining the meat. He quietly steps off the stage and walks over to several eager attendees in the front row and picks up his pen.
“Sell me this pen,” he asks.
As they stumble across various pedestrian responses, “Um … it’s an amazing pen,” “Well, it’s a pretty pen,” and “I personally love this pen.” I found myself ringing from the couch: “Come on, you can do better than that!”
I finally asked myself the question. How would you sell that pen?
That pen is power. Makes communication tangible and memorable. It is part of a creative process that physically involves the more than 30 muscles of the human hand in the act of inspiration and influence. That pen is the way we organize and formulate our thoughts in universally recognizable symbols. It’s proof of concept, napkin math, and back-of-envelope calculations. It is the dotting of I and the crossing of t in a universal attempt to teach, train, and elucidate. That pen is our bayonet in the deep, dark trenches of sale and persuasion.
However, I soon realized that I cannot think of this pen in the same way that I did last year. Illness, death, pandemics, riots, and massive job losses have changed things. This has been a difficult year for many; I am no exception. 2020 has tested our mettle, challenged our sensibilities, and conjured tribal coping skills few modern generations have had to muster. We all live that momentous moment in the second week of April when we come face to face with the bubonic gaze of our 14th century ancestors.
As we masked, hid, and obsessed over our body temperature, the world became a place for them and us. The hoarders and the wringing hands: the Wile E. Coyotes and the Chicken Littles. The coronavirus was heartless and indiscriminate; an extraterrestrial life form that crept into the big cities and small towns, creeping surreptitiously like “the stain” that filters through the corridors of the Colonial Theater.
We dutifully distance ourselves and disembark from our neighbor. Self-incarcerated rapunzels shrinking in our makeshift towers – we zoomed in and remotely, uploaded and unloaded in a daily ritual that became unedited and neglected.
The world of touch was suddenly suspicious. Light switches, doorknobs, keys, and buttons became Ground Zero for respiratory droplets. We ordered from Amazon but were scared of delivery boxes. We braved the grocery store but got stressed out by the card reader. We count 14 days from each chance encounter with the postman and the cashier. We had pandemic planners, blue surgical gloves, and N-95 masks, but we would have easily given up our kingdom for some toilet paper.
The mental gymnastics of tracing the door handle to our hands, our hands to our face, and our face to our eyes, was exhausting. As our minds and bodies crumbled and our relationships disintegrated, there were no trend lines to track the spread of sadness and desolation.
So how would you sell this pen in 2020? I’d say it’s our chance to once again wrap our bare fingers around the palpable and tactile pleasures of life. It is a means by which to pour our internal monologue of hope onto one page and recreate the poetry of proximity. It’s our chance to pull up the chairs, peel off the footprint stickers, and re-fill theaters and restaurants with the beautiful unmasked faces of humanity.
This pen is self-determination. It’s a means to sketch a better ending – getting out of this Truman show and venturing beyond the dome where the simulation ends and the slow dances begin. This is how we find our way home and break the demarcation lines of safe distance to return to the beautiful chaos of reckless union.
If you don’t buy this pen right now in September 2020, then you my friend don’t believe in returns.