I owned a paperback copy of And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.  I never read it.  I gave it to a girlfriend in the 1990s, wrote something in there for her, but she returned it two days later when we broke up.  I doubt she read it, because it's a thick book and she barely had time, given the turmoil going on between us late in the game of our relationship. 
     I don't know what I did with that book.  It was tainted somehow by the failed relationship's bad ending.  I tried to read it twice in later years, couldn't get past the first two pages.  The book weighed like a grim memory.  I gave it to a library book sale, perhaps, or to the Salvation Army, inscription to my ex-girlfriend scribbled over. 
     Some items accumulate malign associations, but isn't that just a way of saying our minds attribute a possibly non-existent thing called luck to inanimate objects?  After being with her, I could barely touch the Nick Cave book because its history involved in part a terrible breakup.  I gave her the book because she liked Nick Cave, but she, too, must have felt the malignity attached to its weight and pages.  The book was from me, a newly resented person in her life, where before I had, for a time, seemed fine to her, indeed. 
     Because I'm a writer, setting ideas in motion in my head much of the time, I must wonder about the true actual ability of people to curse objects, whether wilfully or, as in the case of the Cave book, unknowingly.  Did our electrical storm-like fury at the end of that relationship light up, on some unseen level, the book given one day as a warmly accepted gift, and two days later returned as if smelling like a slime-covered brick? 
     If that kind of thing happens, are inanimate objects affected by our hurt thoughts and dark emotions?  If so, can they fight back by making us feel uneasy or sick inside when our eyes pass over them or when we touch them? 
     I don't suggest this fanciful idea is true.  I do, however, like most people, know the bite of unpleasant associations with some past events.  Somehow, perhaps, the pain would've eased--I wouldn't have needed finally to rid myself of the Nick Cave book--if I could've looked at that paperback and seen a curse clinging to it; something to be lifted by a magical spell.  Outside fiction, though, we don't live in that kind of world, and yet, the objects in our lives with bad associations work their sorcery regardless of the non-truth or truth of the fantasy elevating them to an intelligence interacting with human minds so capable of believing in angels.

                                                                            Vic Neptune