Hendrix's Twisted Tale

Hendrix’s Twisted Tale

“Hendrix stop that now!”
I stared with as much expression as possible with my simple cat’s face and tried to detach my claws from the mat I had been exercising them in.
“If you don’t stop that right now I’m going to kick you all the way to the cat flap!”
With a final satisfying rip my solitary remaining front paw came away from the hall carpet. I lost my right front leg in an ‘accident’ ten years ago. Yeah, sure THE GREAT ENTITY allows stuff like that to happen accidentally!
Staff 1 bellowed again his eyes bulging with his angry shout
“Hendrix!”
Yes, that’s my name I thought-miaowed to him and made a break for the cat flap in the kitchen door. You can never tell what they are going to do next, can you? Due to their lack of real intelligence or grace and general instability you can never rely on your staff to do as you want, when you want it. Don’t even get me started about the charade of getting food in a bowl at a regular time! Worst of all they handle me without warning or invitation, ignoring all protocols and good manners. In view of what I’ve found out about who I really am this morning it just proves that THE GREAT ENTITY really is having a real laugh with our re-incarnations.

Once through the cat-flap, into the utility area I momentarily smell-regard my food. One of Buddha’s pronouncements said something about an austere and limited life is better than no life. I’ve meditated on that one for the 12 years of this reincarnation a lot! Memory, never great in staff form is definitely poor in cat form. Still I retained and picked up the odd sound bite about a former life as a rock-god and knew that the simple damnation in Hades that many predicted had not happened…..yet.
Staff 2 had followed me out on his way to the garden
“No, Hendrix you’re not having any more food until your bowls empty”
She is much more respectful of my status and actually appreciates the touch-manners I extend to her pliably for a 3 legged cat, winding and rubbing in a polite figure of 8 around her legs. It amuses me how I can make it just a little bit more difficult for her to carry on loading the washing machine next to my food in my sleeping quarters.

Staff or cat in form I can still get round the ladies. What I do find difficult to accept is the seemingly obligatory removal of my gonads, seemingly to make our meditative lives deeper and richer without the distractions of sex. I imagine Staff 1 has his because he’s too stupid to be able to meditate. Some less favoured cat-reincarnations still have sex and I believe females do sometimes still have kittens just like staff have babies. It’s obvious that these cat-re-incarnations have been less fortunate in their soul placement`: they often live in multi-cat-reincarnation colonies (with crazy old staff quite often) or really horrifically in the wild, outdoors. THE GREAT ENTITY, our overall controller, is austerely cruel how SHE-HE-IT applies the rules about souls acquiring higher or lower status. I try, Gandhi like, to guard against sexual impulses but as I always thought I was Jimi Hendrix, lapses inevitably happen. I say thought because disturbingly I’ve just found my actual original previous re-incarnation was as someone far more important. Understand that if I say THE GREAT ENTITY I mean SHE-HE-IT or GOD or a god of higher status because I’m not sure staff (that’s you oh 10 fingered one!) really believe in or understand the way life and souls work. “Oh God, where are my socks” you’ll hear Staff 1 say, like THE GREAT ENTITY is going to stop messing with him and answer him because he’s cross! Look at what THE GREAT ENTITY’s sense of order or humour has served me up with.

Me the first staff/man since Robert Johnson to use the guitar to advance the depths a live soul could be taken, the heights I could tease you to! So many saw my left-handedness as distinctive and symbolic. Sinistra, left-handed, of the devil to some; original, gifted and from Mars as I once jokingly told a rock journalist. Through his words 500,000 stoned adolescents in a field in New York State and the following year, The Isle of Wight gave serious thought to his retailing of my off the cuff remark.
Then so soon after those great festivals SHE-HE-IT decided to take not only my life, my balls and my gathering fame but also my guitar-fretting arm. Staff 1&2 affectionately, at times call me Tripod rather than Hendrix on account of my three-leggedness before they go on to explain how I got run-down and lost my front right leg to a speeding car that failed to allow me precedence on the road.
Up to that point in my life I had been slowly reaching a realisation of how I came to be in what you call a ‘cat’. I’d got over loosing my testes and from hearing oddments and fragments of Staff1 and Staff2 talking about Jimi Hendrix (he-staff go on about my guitar skills; she-staff about my sexuality……go figure!). No it’s not for minor gods to understand the complexities and ranking systems of re-incarnation but you would of thought that a god such as Kali would.

HE-SHE-IT’s sense of humour knows no bounds but always has reason. Being a eunuch cat I’m not supposed to be affected by sex. Unfortunately if I find a jersey or worse pair of knickers of Staff2’s it’s like I’m playing guitar again and while I’m thinking I’m singing and playing guitar I’m actually trying to have sex with an article of clothing. By turns they get cross and find it funny that I have sex with their clothes. What I really don’t like, especially as my supposed androgyny was a cause of interest in my Hendrix form, is when I sometimes get ‘jiggy’ with his underpants he accuses me of being homosexual. Being bi-sexual is actually mild compared to finding out I’m actually female! What I found out reading while sitting on her lap the internet reference to Indian Gods shocked me
“…offering to Thee of a thousand Akanda flowers with seed, becomes without any effort a Lord of the earth. 0 Kali, whoever on Tuesday at midnight, having uttered Thy mantra, makes offering even but once with devotion to Thee of a hair of his Sakti [his female companion] in the cremation-ground, becomes a great poet, a Lord of the earth, and ever goes mounted upon an elephant.”
It was the 1000 Akanda flowers. Always piled in my temples, especially Tuesdays. Women’s hair, crematoria and staff wanting elephants to ride brought it back to me in a flash Ha-bloody ha GREAT ENTITY! Six arms reduced to one! Today I found out I am actually an earthly manifestation of Kali the wife of Shiva!”

Anyway “that was then this is now” as we gods in the eternity business say. I’m here in the raspberry canes meditating and deep-thinking, not a 70’s guitar hero or one of the most powerful Hindu deities but a 3-legged ginger (in colour obviously!) cat. I remember the newspaper that THE GREAT ENTITY obviously arranged to be placed under my feeding bowl. At the bottom of an advert he tells me not to worry but to be aware that with re-incarnation you can become higher or lower status

“Please be aware that the value of your investments can go up as well as down”.

Alan Harley

12-x-2009