I felt the frustration boil, slowly bubbling like the confusion that fogged my thoughts. “Cooker”. Was it an appliance? A benchtop solution to no-fuss meals that required a modicum of fuss? Key strokes into an overused phone said this was true. Still, I flailed at the idea, struggling to grasp the smokescreen. Deeper now, bewildered by online warriors insistent a “cooker” was a drug addict. Cooked. And all this while my brain ricocheted backed, insistent it could somehow be a "cooker-burra".

This felt very break-the-fourth-wall. For some reason I really struggled to land on an image, smell, place, whatever for “cooker”. Before I started writing I googled “Cooker” because it felt familiar, but it was also so vague. It could mean any number of things. I then found the same question on Reddit and the comments were unanimous that it was a drug-addled person or someone who had gone off the rails - they were cooked. But to me, “cooker" isn't “cooked” so instead of sitting and trying to come up with something. I took inspiration from my confusion and wrote about that. 

Despite all of this, my very first thought after I read the prompt was “cooker-burra”. So while I was trying to wrangle the sensory idea of a benchtop appliance or someone who's absolutely cooked, I just kept trying to think how I could use word play to get back to Cooker-burra. Would have been hilarious if I committed (I'm sure). 

In case you're not Aussie, or you simply don't get the reference, it would have been a delightfully terrible pun on Kookaburra.