Korea: Simple snacks at home and lessons in simplicity

This may come as something of a surprise to you, but I'm a person who absolutely and utterly adores food. Not only is food a necessary form of fuel to power us through the routine tasks of everyday existence, but it's also a form of entertainment and escape, an art in and of itself. The foods that speak most strongly to each person's soul are going to be as unique to that individual as their thumbprint, due in large part to what they grew up eating but also to the formative food experiences they've had over the years. I know, some of you probably rolled your eyes so hard at the phrase "formative food experiences" that you're reading this sentence through your nostrils. That's fine. I understand your hesitance, the skeptical glare sweeping your eyes. For a lot of people out there, walking around, food is solely fuel and therefore maintains a lowly stasis as something that must be done, not something that should be done, and that's a shame. A formative food experience, however, is a resplendent and unimitable experience, where something simple takes on all new elevation. 

    

Fish was one of these formative food experiences for me. Growing up I was pretty lucky, for a desert dweller, to be blessed with the opportunity to try various kinds of seafood at an early age. I was a pretty adventurous eater from youth, so I was more than happy to mow down mussels or join my dad for a crab leg night at the local buffet, and an obsession with the original Japanese Iron Chef (dubbed over for American television) didn't hurt either. Even so, fish itself wasn't something we ate much of- definitely never was it ever cooked it in our home. It was looked down upon as a diet food, something bland and boring to be breaded and deep fried and only eaten on a whimsical flight of fancy in the form of a filet o'fish on some drunken eve. Plus, there's that notorious smell it's known for releasing, so it just wasn't around much. One fateful day while living in Japan, however, I found myself introduced to a new approach to eating fish- skewered, simply grilled for a long, slow cooking period over charcoal. The skin was crackly, crispy and had that deep, unmistakable charcoal essence while the juices ran down the stick and along my arms. I sat hunched over among the stones at a temple near my home, a festival raging around me, focused on my fish. It was ridiculously affordable, and in the end it changed my approach to fish. Now, any time I confront an unfamiliar type of fish at the market, as I had while living in Korea and found a package of these long iridescent belt fish, I would grill them, simply, with salt. While using a frying pan sorely lacks the charcoal essence, you're still able to get a decent level of crispiness to the skin and the salt brings out the flavor in the fish without burying it in unnecessary extravagance. The method is simply called 塩焼き or shioyaki, salt-grilled. While Korea has taught me to appreciate soups, Japan taught me to enjoy rice and the simple pleasure of a well-seasoned fish.  

And, of course, dessert is always nice, too.

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...

A fucking horror show, I tell you.