Samples from the Box of No Return
I'm packing my office closet, and realized that The Box of No Return was overflowing. So in order to exercise my tesselation superpower on it, I had to upend it on my office floor and repack it from scratch.
I hadn't done that in a very long time.
You may have a Box of No Return. It's downstairs from the Midwestern Junk Drawer, hidden behind the Jar of Loose Change. It's for stuff you know damned well you'll never use again, but simply can't bring yourself to throw away. A lot of it may be mementos. Some of it is just cool. Most of it could be dumped if you were a braver (and less sentimental) man than I.
I took some representative samples and laid them out rectilinearly on the carpet for a quick photo. Behold my 1970s Xerox photo ID, 3,000 yen of Japanese folding money, a Wizard of Speed and Time button, a tooth from a cow--and a couple of dead crowns of my very own. Name badges from obsolete callsigns, Comdex buttons, a 2708 EPROM without the quartz plate over the chip, a packet of real gold leaf, a sealing wax candle from my early correspondence with Carol, ROTC insignia, and two of the weird little HP thingamabobs that I still haven't identified. (Scroll down to the February 9 entry.) There's a shell case from the 21-gun salute the VFW fired at my father's funeral in 1978, Carol's GT membership badge (mine has been lost) and lots of keys for locks long forgotten. (I did find the keys for my Kennedy toolchest in the garage, so I guess it's The Box That Asymptotically Converges on No Return.) There's a Space Shuttle rubber stamp and my Iguanacon badge, to stand in for the 20-odd con badges in the box. The red cylinder is a medium-format film can, into which the Fox Patrol crammed a reasonable first aid kit in 1965, and won the prize for best first aid kit.
I tossed a couple of things, like my SFWA membership badge. SFWA wanted to get rid of me for years for not publishing often enough; I saved them the trouble. Rot in irrelevancy, you dorks; I'm an indie now, and making significant money. Some promo buttons were for products I couldn't even recall, and they went in the cause of making room. But most of it will go back in the (small) box, and it will all fit, with room to spare for artifacts not yet imagined, much less acquired.
If you have a Box of No Return, dump it out on the floor every few years. (I haven't been through mine since the mid-90s.) You may be surprised what's in there. I was.