There is a literal hellbox. That’s a photo of it, above. The real one is in my garage, sitting on my tool-bench.

I inherited it from my father-in-law. He inherited it from his father. 

My father-in-law, Bill, wasn't a carpenter, or mason, electrician, plumber, or a builder. But he could fix anything. The call people like him “handy,” but he was beyond handy. He was untrained in the ways of building and repair but skilled and with a mind focused to think through how a thing was done and then he’d do it. He left me tools I still use today including the hellbox. 

By definition, a hellbox is "any container of items such as small parts whose contents are mixed together in a random fashion and which are completely unorganized so as to make searching for any particular item especially difficult and finding a particular item extremely time consuming and sometimes very unlikely.” 

The hellbox is so much more than the definition.

It is memory-laden, cranky and obtuse. Searching for a certain-sized bolt or nut, you may run your finger along the edge of an old rusty Gillette razor-blade saved here for what reason? Like most discoveries, it comes with a little pain. You learn quickly to use one piece of metal to search for another.  

The hellbox is both a real thing and a metaphor for the inside of a mind; a kind of stream-of-conscious assemblage of artifacts, parts, and pieces encountered at one time or another. Like the mind that did not dream, did not organize its memories, but left them for the owner to search and discover as it may or may not.  

It's a place of ideas.

Ideas too dear to be discarded but not having an application. It’s a sampling of memories and images that landed with me because they no longer seem to belong anywhere else.  It is from a time when, rather than discard things, we – hellbox owners, that is – believe those memories, thoughts and ideas are items that will serve another day and we will find them when they’re need but, saved here. Saved to my hellbox.