it all began with the wildebeest in my head
An explanation for all the cocoon nonsense I wouldn't shut up about, explored through bad poems & journal entries. 11/04/25 - 20/05/25 - present.
It all began with the wildebeest in my head. I met some guy at the Welsh Dragon who claimed to have slept with Iggy Pop’s stylist - ‘the Japanese beat up his jeans for him & send them to him & this guy puts them on Iggy’ - then I went to work & served some Crusaders some beers on 11/04/24 & suddenly then the word ‘wildebeest’ began stampeding around my head. Wildebeest, wildebeest, wildebeest. I got home drunk & wrote a poem of sorts…
then proceeded to follow it with ‘Wildebeest! They were in my head all along. I’m telling you. Wildebeest.’
This seems to be a common recurrence in my life, animals populating my skull. In high school it was trout, fat fucking fuckoff trout beating each other up with their tails all the time. I used this as an excuse to wag class & sit in the library by myself, always complaining about having no friends but choosing isolation regardless. I solved that riddle after learning about David Lynch’s fish as ideas - catch the big fish! - & assimilated my own trout to all the worldly ideologies I was exposed to after leaving the Church, battling each other for dominance in my mind. I have mainly Love toward the Church Outside of Politics but that calls for a separate essay. After the trout it was horses that broke in to my dreams & I got all twisted up about the horses in my dreams but then realised it was actually just PJ Harvey lyrics in my head & that riddle solved itself… but these wildebeest. They called for their own poem of sorts. I called it ‘Guess What Word Is In My Head…It’s Wildebeest.’
Squinting again, I was. There was some nebulous object in the future I was trying to pick apart but I wasn’t sure what it was just yet. I dyed my eyebrows back to black & Easter fell on 04/20/25 & I said grace before my cone & wrote in my Notes App
then didn’t write for four whole days but returned with a new word, sourced from HST’s ‘Hell’s Angels.’
“Law enforcement officers have compared their guile to that of the snipe, a wily beast that many have seen but few have ever trapped. This is because the snipe has the ability to transform himself, when facing capture, into something entirely different. The only other animals capable of this are the werewolf and the Hell’s Angel, which have many traits in common. The physical resemblance is obvious, but far more important is the transmogrification factor, the strange ability to alter their own physical structure, and hence, disappear.”
TRANSMOGRIFICATION. The word is only mentioned twice in the book but it appeared on the page in neon flashing lights & proceeded to start jabbing inked needles into my skull, tattooing itself on my mind. TRANSMOGRIFICATION. Defined by Oxford as ‘to transform in a surprising or magical manner;’ defined by Merriam-Webster as ‘to change or alter greatly & often with grotesque or humorous effect;’ defined by Cambridge ‘the act or process of changing or being changed completely.’ My mind felt like Jack Nicholson’s typewriter, machine malfunctioning. I was still some kind of limbo, but indeed. Change, as it always is, was on the horizon.
Digress: I have always gotten off to the idea of rebelling against my potential. Just because the shoe fits doesn’t mean I have to wear it. What if I think the shoe is fucking ugly? What if I can’t be fucked going to the ball because it’s probably full of performative rich fucks taking Instagram pictures & besides I want to eat an entire packet of salt & vinegar chips in my bed & watch a Cronenberg movie instead? Revel in my own stuck-up solitude? What then? What if the caterpillar is happy crawling around on some little nice little stalks, munching away on the yummy yummy leaves? What if it does not think itself less beautiful than the butterfly?
Hmph. Anyway. Down to business. There was some movement up there, an itchiness. Itchy hooves. The wildebeest were preparing the migrate, as they do, but here lay a great fork in my dreams. Multiple forks. A whole cutlery drawer, perhaps. The cartographer of the future had drawn too many maps in my heart & the wildebeest in my head were getting disoriented - oh no. It’s ye old fig tree. The doorman waits as you shift your feet & umm & ahh & squint & furrow your brow & think Fuck Which Door Does Regret Lie Behind but it’s a trick question. It’s a scam. Regret will tickle the edge of your shadow your whole life if you let it but you can’t sit around waiting for some White Rabbit to lead you out of society into happy chappy Wonderland so chop chop. What are you doing with your life? Where will your wildebeest steer you to? Where were my wildebeest steering me to?
April’s petals were slowly closing & I could feel my own kind of petals lifting & the next time I sat at the cafe window with my book I felt a tug, back to 04/20, penetrating my consciousness. COCOON. Me. Cocooned, unconsciously. Limbo yet again. Was it Bjork in my mind? There was no intimate sex on the horizon. It didn’t make sense. Siouxsie Sioux? Perhaps? Or something different?
“Here in my cot where my cot loves me
I’ll stay here a while in the cotton wool cocoon
‘Til the chrysalis is ripe
‘Til the time is right…”
(Cocoon - Siouxsie & The Banshees)
The sense I held of being mentally & spiritually cocooned wouldn’t shake for the next few months. The word TRANSMOGRIFICATION would also stay imprinted behind my eyes. It took me an embarrassingly large amount of writing to draw the obvious connection between the two, though the real epiphany happened on the evening of 24/05/25, after a few beers with a few mates at Rogue & Vagabond. S.M, for a reason already forgotten, brought up the fact that caterpillars turn into liquid inside the chrysalis & retain memories of being a caterpillar. I scribbled this down immediately & later, when I opened my journal, the word transmogrification began its daily rattle around my head. TRANSMOGRIFICATION. To change completely, magically, fantastically… what’s the prime physical example of it?
But hey, it’s always the journey, never the destination, blah-blah-blah all that shit you’ve heard before. 90% of my writing reaches blindingly obvious & occasionally reductive conclusions but I have a talent for taking strange paths to get there. The route is scenic, I swear. The scene in this case was beer.
But to back-track. On 27/04/25, Patti Smith posted a picture of Osamu Dazai’s grave. His magnum opus, ‘No Longer Human,’ sits at the top, while the bottom is decked with beer cans, a bottle of whisky, flowers & a water bottle. I found this rather inspiring & thought to write my own version of an imagined grave, which read as follows -
- not out of morbidness but rather self-reflection, an analysis of my mortal material values. A few hours later, on my work break, I headed to my usual spot at Midnight Espresso & opened with ‘Everyone’s so goddamn confused about their existences & the rest of their lives. We are all dumb headless chickens squawking our projected confusions at each other like an out-of-practise orchestra. Also, I don’t know anything about anything’ then scrawled some ramblings about thinking & knowing & said hi to a friend & ordered a second coffee. For some reason, on this particular Sunday, ‘This Is The Day’ by The The was stuck in my head. I’d been humming it during lunch service & found myself humming it again, swinging my legs on my stool. I translated this to the page in declaring that ‘I think it would be good practice to listen to ‘This Is The Day’ by The The ritualistically in the morning until I know all the words & believe it. Everyone always anticipates change to be some great table-flipping monster with a halo emerging from the shadows, but sometimes it is just a new blade of grass in the backyard. Rephrase: sometimes you’re waiting for your opponent Fate to flip the table in a fit of glorious rage but really he’s just going to move a pawn on the chessboard. Mmm. What if Fate is your friend instead?’ then packed up, satisfied & headed back to work.
G.H, my muse & mirror, moved to Melbourne on 14/02/25 this year. Though we don’t call often, every time we do it’s just as transcendental as the conversations we have lying in the grass. G.H’s company transforms the Earth into the Heavens, mundanity into divinity. She’s just one of those people. I don’t remember how moths became a motif between us (I swear it has nothing to do with bisexuality) but in fifteenhood there was a video of her dodging a manic one & I’d send her videos back every time they came to greet my bedside lamp. Anyway. When I got home from my shift that day I called L.O, who asked what I was doing for my birthday this year. My last year of teenagehood, innit. A new decade awaits. I am the kind of person who is insistent on infusing meaning into times & dates - I refuse to be the same version of myself I was the season / year / age prior & I refuse to feel the same on my birthday as I did the morning before. I take such milestones & opportunities for change very seriously; I force a new Russian doll out of my mouth & watch it nest the rest, enveloping me in a layer of novelty. I replied that I wasn’t sure what this year would look like, maybe we could take a trip somewhere & then shortly after that call was over G.H. called me for the first time since she moved & the cogs in my mind began to turn.
The lines were drawing themselves at this point. Everything finally began to make sense. That was indeed the day my life could surely change - reroute itself, or rather, take some kind of direction at all. The wildebeest in my head could migrate in the direction of a familiar mind; moths emerge from cocoons too, not just butterflies. I’m always going on about limbo & how much I love it & airports & vehicles & in-between destinations being the prime physical example of it & oh yeah I love moulding the ordinary into the symbolic lemme enrich all this meaninglessness & hold on. Cocoons. Limbo. Cocoons. Joints between the past & the future, the old & the new… I began to grow excited, happily losing sleep over the possibility of actualising my forming fantasy. All the seemingly arbitrary motifs arising in my journals were finally beginning to connect themselves. All those objects I wanted on my grave - they’d fit nicely in a suitcase (though, spoiler alert, I ended up spending $400 posting 15 journals & 45 books & 70 CDs to my future flat). It had to be on my birthday. It was far too perfect. To celebrate myself Walt Whitman style deep in limbo; to start a new decade in a new place. To die a small death & emerge, EMERGE, from my cocoon with new wings. To flourish! To fly. A-ha. To fly.
On 01/02/25 I sat at my favourite whisky bar for my usual ridiculous amount of time & scrawled some complaints about being on my period feeling like there was a villain inside my big robot head jamming on the controllers going doof doof doof but I felt better than I did after smoking some evil American weed the previous night that made me feel like a raw chicken which naturally posed the question of: is it better to feel like a raw chicken or a cooked chicken? To be cooked or to be raw? Raw sounds better, realer, more authentic, but connotes nudity; is it better to be clothed or to be naked? To conceal what is sacred or to let it all out? Well. To be cooked one must be cooked… cooking… one must undergo the changing of states… the changing of states… the great in-between. I must first be defrosted, softened, liquefied as the caterpillar is inside the cocoon. Awareness of change & growth - that’s the hair & fingernails of it all. I must pay attention to the wings sprouting from my shoulder blades, & emerge from the pan prepared to be consumed by a brand-new city. Unless, perhaps, we never leave the pan. We are cooking forever, never burning, only gaining flavour. Just keep adding seasoning. Measure with your heart.
On 05/05/25 I thought a lot more about cocoons & sensed that I was leaving my larval stage. My pupal stage was incoming. There was no denying it. That night, G.H. called again so I took the bullet between my back teeth & clamped them together like it was my final meal, pressing ‘Purchase,’ heart racing. I felt like the cockroach at the end of 1997 Nowhere - I’m outta here. Out the window, into the endless night. This road had no forks. It’s a one way fucking street. This was me, frantically plunging my needle full of symbolism into the vein of the mundane & for the next five months I was coming up, anticipating the peak. It would hit like nothing else. On 07/05/25 I headed to Christchurch for a getaway & on the second day I made a solo trip to the art gallery, where within minutes I found myself sitting on a beanbag with a VR headset on watching a little boy with fire in his hands covering my eyes, transporting me deep into a Japanese forest. ‘Soon you will see with the eyes of the butterfly… the light that surrounds all things…’ said the narrator & sure enough, after a long, slow blink, the forest floor & the trees overhead were framed in magical rays of light. I was always skeptical of virtual reality’s intersection with art but this experience (which extended into a much longer & more complicated storyline about Death & fire to be experienced firsthand) really made me question my opinions.
Regardless, I carried my newfound butterfly eyes out into the world & ordered a cider at the first bar I saw, opening my journal & beginning to ramble about how I’ve been regifted with an awareness of the fact that we are all headed in the same direction… Fate, Death, a beacon in the distance; we must seize the notion that with every passing second reality could take an infinite number of possible routes there. Change in the form of moving a single piece on the chessboard? Though in October the table will be catapulted across the room (or, rather, sold on Facebook Marketplace). That’s for October’s pretty head to worry about, though. Between now & then the path is empty. There’s a chunk missing in the landscape though it is not disrupted, it is filled only by emptiness - empty colour which blends right into next segment of space & time, empty colour that looks just like heaven & the sun & the music on the radio & the new fire bestowed upon my very palms. The colour of fire mimics the autumn leaves. I continued to fuck heavy with the idea of emergence, savouring the moment I emerged from the experience, emerged from the gallery, emerged from the plane back to Wellington. I pictured the way I’d emerge from the plane five months from then, & treated that descent as a rehearsal for my grand emergence from my cocoon on my birthday. There was a great lamp in my future, & once my wings had grown I would fly towards it, getting drunk off the light, zipping back & forth for more. The light! The light. The tunnel was not endless. There was a direction to crawl in - something to crawl towards, rather - & crawl I would. Hands & knees.
On 20/05/25 I got home from work to R.W. handing me an itty bitty caterpillar she found in her room. I let it explore my left hand then put it on my Fear & Loathing poster, where it inspected HST’s cigarette holder, then ducked behind one of the ripped corners. I went to bed, amused but not thinking much of it. The next day, I was delighted to watch it emerge again on the wall by my bed while I was FaceTiming L.O. I picked it up & it inched again, across my palm, before mysteriously disappearing after ten minutes. Or so I thought, until I saw movement at the bottom of my laptop screen & looked down at the space below my elevated hand. The little guy was swinging around in midair, seemingly impossibly hovering between my bed & I. I squinted at his squirming body & came to realise that he’d spun one round of silk around my finger in an attempt to protect himself from an imaginary threat. Silk, the same stuff he’d eventually use to spin his cocoon & metamorphose. Well. Let’s not unpack that imaginary threat. If this wasn’t motivation to start preparing for my own transmogrification, I don’t know what would’ve been. The beginning of the future was upon me; it was time to fucking fly. I thought back one more time to 04/20, to Easter, like the Patti Smith album. Patti Smith’s post… or, rather, Easter, the day of Jesus’ rising. His emergence. From the grave. A-ha.
It all made sense.
Anyway. Of course there were other factors in my decision to leave, such as, let’s see, the fact that I worked six days a week in a country where if I wanted to change jobs I’d have to join the 500+ other applicants for bottom-of-the-chain franchise salesperson positions clawing their way through the joke of a job market fighting to live on a soon-to-be-cut benefit but hey, I was lucky enough to have pinned down two jobs except at one of them I experienced a ridiculous amount of microaggression that led me to quit & I never wrote that essay about it & I could count all my Asian friends in the city who had the potential to understand on one hand & none of them were Chinese & oh wait I’ve completely lost connection to my culture & had no way to mend it there also the price of food & oh my god everything about the godforsaken new people in power putting all their useless time into arguing what defines a man & a woman & hey how about they ‘define the principles of the Treaty’ to make it devalue our indigenous people even more oh wait let’s take Te Reo out of schools & not recognise Palestine as a state & y’know, overlook the blindingly obvious increase in homelessness while somehow adding bars to half the benches in the city. No thanks. Sure, 200 people are migrating to Australia every day & I am one of them. Suck it. Still, the Great Big Bottomless Capitalistic Butthole Drain spares nobody, but at least I will not freak out at the supermarket every week here. &, y’know, work a normal amount of days. One step at a time. Good luck to my soldiers surviving Luxon’s excuse for a government. If shit doesn’t get better spin your own cocoon someday.
