Nau speak: Vegas: A den of penultimate horror, aka the Storage Unit (and bonus sunset drive)

Do you want to play a game?

What scares you? Is it cradling your phone close to your face in the deep of night, huddled under your blankets with only the cool electronic glow to stave off the darkness as you read Nosleep or Creepypasta into the early hours? Or do you prefer visceral visual gore, a screen painted in vibrant and guttural shades of red and pink with all the imagination and texture the creation department could muster through gallons of corn syrup and latex? Or are you more into the slow creeping cerebral of psychological horrors?

I like a fair bit of each, depending on my mood. Sometimes I want a slithering, spine-tingling spectacle that lingers and latches on, like a greasy film from a cheap lotion- the kind of creeping dread that H P. Lovecraft is so adept at crafting. Other days you just want a big absurd splashfest in the vein of Dead Alive by Peter Jackson (yes, the same guy who made Lord of the Rings) where the cringe-inducing pus-squirts and custard incidents, as revolting as they are, are still snuggly-wrapped in their blanket of Kiwi humor. There are even those days (probably more oft than naught) where a mostly-light-hearted rom-zom-comedy like Shaun of the Dead fits the bill best of all. The greatest thing about all these multifaceted horrors is that most can be left behind by simply shutting a book or pressing a button. Slam. Zap. The spookiness is over and mostly gone. Tentacles recoil into the ink stains forming the words on the page, and gnashing teeth fade to black.

But these horrors are all firmly rooted in fiction, so at the end of the day, no amount of fear or anxiety they induce is based on any real, imminent threats to you. Movies, books, even terrifying-anxiety-inducing-nightmare fests of a game like Dead Space are entertainment, for better or for worse. These are outlets that allow us to confront these things in safety, shouting at the clumsy victim of the moment as they stumble and stagger their way through their scripted slaughter. Reality itself provides no shortage of macabre and mortifying material to contend with, and for me, this often manifests as an overwhelming abundance of stuff. I strive for a minimalist sort of existence and having hopped continents several times now while living out of one or two suitcases found it extremely liberating. Less is more, they say, and whoever they are they've got the right idea. There are few things quite so deeply, unnervingly horrific as the storage unit. A place where your excess stuff goes to be forgotten, locked away in a spare bedroom you pay to forget. It's ridiculous- instead of, say, getting rid of the detritous that ways you down, it accumulates to the point of needing an additional offsite location to put it...so not only are you paying for the house you yourself need space to live in, but a separate home for your stuff. What sense does that make?! It's like the dead coming to life, but it's all your dead stuff that's chasing you down, draining your finances and patience, hoarding their dust-bunnies and potential spider-nests in wait until the day they can strike you down...