Me & Tara returned from Ohio this past week. We were visiting family, celebrating the fact we got married. And we return empty-handed. There were boxes & boxes & boxes of things I thought I had lost given back to me by my parents.

Boxes of books, movie memorabilia, photographs. But the most important thing is a very large black, heavy-plastic toolbox (the type you affix to the bed of a truck) full of my early writing. Years & years’ worth of writing. There is even a thin brown leather journal filled with terrible poems I wrote when I was 16.

Rare magazines with articles & dedications to Hunter S. Thompson were found. An old portable typewriter from World War 2, a stuffed Friedrich Nietzsche.

Many things from former lives…

I did not expect to be impacted the way that I was. Specifically, when I opened one of the plastic boxes. Beneath the books & horror movie memorabilia, there was an old Bible – My grandfather’s Bible. I was in a hotel room with Tara, about to go to a restaurant to sign some books, close to a panic attack – I don’t do well in crowds – & there was this old Bible.

Now, I am not a religious son-of-a-bitch, but I know that book meant something to my grandfather. And it was something he left to me when he died.

Seeing it calmed me down.

It also made me very emotional. It was a treasure I had thought was lost… burned up with so many of my other possessions from the past.

The past will always catch up to you. Whether you want it to or not. But sometimes, sometimes, it can be a comfort.

The point being: never assume how you will feel when that finger taps you on the shoulder to remind you of where you have been… & the people that were included.