The Box. I unearth it in the basement of a Venice Beach hotel, hidden behind cartons of newspapers, Christmas ornaments and a …fondue set. (Seriously?) It’s a great box, if you’re into that kind of thing. A curled metal lip softens the cold, brushed-metal edges and a lid rests seductively on top like a depleted lover.

I paid a little more, but any old box wouldn’t cut it.

The legendary-in-my-own-mind “Idea Box”, a treasure trove of lightning bolt brainstorms, fiercely imagined stories and million dollar business ideas that could reshape the world. All that stuff is worthy of a sweet box. It’s 18 inches at the top, then tapers to its foot-wide base like a barrel-chested bulldog. There are a pair of handles, but it’s never easy lifting. It’s actually really heavy, the weight of notepads and sketches and torn book jacket covers covered with hastily scrawled ideas. I’d scratch down ideas before I lost them, and toss them just as quickly into the Idea Box. And shut the lid on ’em. Here, they’d be safe from theft, from fire, from flood. Did I tell you how sturdy this box is? It’ll preserve the greatness for generations; safe keeping for the zombie apocalypse and sky blackening meteor strikes. This thing will last.

Through the years, I filled The Box with inspired, stomach-fluttering starts of brilliance, a collection of mastery. It’s been a while since I cracked the lid, but my face doesn’t melt Raiders of the Lost Ark style when I let the oxygen in. Notebooks and steno pads compete for attention with the bar coasters that captured closing time brainstorms.

Heading out on the road full time with Camping Kitty, I’d forgotten all about the Idea Box. It was dusty and hidden, but no worse for wear, a reinforced tin fortress. It’s a great box, ready for more ideas to be stuffed down deep inside. It dawns on me here in the dumpy basement of a Venice Beach hotel that I don’t even know what the hell’s in it. As if writing down ideas acknowledges them and grants permission to forget them. They were real — written in black and blue and pencil and Sharpie — all before me in The Box. Suddenly, I have the urge to slide the lid back on and hide it back beneath the Christmas ornaments and f#@&ing fondue set.

Thumbing through some of the notes, I barely recognize the voice. It’s like I’m reading someone’s journal after they ripped up all the pages and threw them in the air. Bad poetry summons Jim Morrison. There’s a sketch of a soldier getting shot and something titled “Frolic in the Bleak”. There’s stuff that makes me laugh, like the mashup movie idea “Teen Wolf Blitzer” and a yellow-covered book “Drunk Driving for Dummies”. But none of this is me, not anymore.

I’m holding a drawing of a man with a marshmallow for a head and wearing a Nestle Hot Cocoa t-shirt when I notice my pit bull Jameson looking at me. There’s longing in his eyes. He probably wants to get out of this dusty basement and jump in the hotel fountain. But I’m hearing him say: “Throw it away, Jack. We don’t need this in our lives.”

He’s wise beyond his years. All three of ’em.

Like the college textbooks and precious Santa figurines and all the other crap calling this circa-1981 meeting room home these past few years, it’s trash. It no longer serves me, so obvious under the sterile fluorescent lighting and carpeted walls. This thing looks like a coffin. It’s where ideas went to die in anonymity. These ideas were gifted to me from another realm, but they’re gifts I never opened, like that f#@&ing fondue set. Rather than pass them on, I hoarded them and sealed them tight.

Baggage comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it’s not even tangible. And clearing clutter can be in the abstract. The best ideas aren’t snuffed so easily, they stay and needle me like Jameson when he wants to get outside. This box weighs me down. It’s got no place on our bus as we rumble ahead, only ahead. We’ve come to a crossroads, The Box and I, and the only direction I won’t go is the one behind us.

This beautiful, brushed-metal, fireproof box with a curled lip and dual rotating handles needs to go in the ground. Dust to dust. Return the ideas to their maker and inspire another, on a separate road.

Last night, Jameson dug a hole while Kitty and I sipped whiskey in the moonlight. He’s a prescient guy. I find my shovel and dig deeper, adding to the pile of loose earth outside my cabin door. Forward we go. I’m leaving The Idea Box behind with everything else, with the Christmas ornaments and f#@&ing fondue set that take up space. Our past was what it was. We can only affect the road ahead.

My landlord walks by and sees the open grave (about right for her little Pekingese) but doesn’t pry. I keep digging, then lower The Box 20 inches deep. I push dirt in around it with my shovel. There’s no grand ceremony. Covering it with a couple inches of dirt and tamping it down, I’ll leave a treasure for an Indiana Jones to unearth one day, maybe for the Flannel Jack Museum. It’s out of sight, that solid, seductive, fireproof, brushed-metal box, and out of my mind. I feel lighter already.

In the grass, I see a paintbrush, a holdover from a project the week before. Seems like a fitting marker, so I jam it into the earth, bristles up in salute to the fallen creative soldiers below.

Being a minimalist is being unburdened. Let the ideas of your past flit away with the breeze that brought them to you.