Little Monster
Our journey begins 857 years ago, in the year of the hare on the ancient calendar of the twelve beasts. It was the year 1157 of the Christian era. A child was born. A child like most, of no relative significance – born into a world of lust and violence, this child would learn quickly to fight for his survival, for his mere existence in a punishingly brutal land.
Abandoned by his people, his tribe, he would be forced by circumstance into a never ending struggle for survival. None, not one single person, save for the gods themselves could have surmised the divine and irresistible purpose brewing within this child—this boy. It is said the child born unto this earth entered the realm of the living clutching in his right hand a clot of blood. That the stars themselves shone with purpose and meaning, not unlike the stories of the Bible with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, if only someone were to look to the skies and read the signs.
They say his birth, his clutching of a clot of blood, was an omen of death and destruction. This child would come to fulfill a glorious destiny uniting all the tribes of his people, conquering, destroying all who stood in the path of his vision. His destiny: fighting for survival of his familial bloodline. The child’s name was Temujin. Soon he would come to be known as Genghis Khan.
Now I’m not a psychic but I know what you must be thinking: How is it possible that this man’s story can begin with, or even relate to Genghis Khan on any level or plane. The simple answer is that it doesn’t. My story, however, had to start somewhere. Besides, couldn’t we all relate aspects of our lives to any other historical figure throughout time and antiquity? I often say that a man ignorant of the past will defile the future. History in many cases has a way of repeating itself.
I have always been an emphatic naysayer when I hear mention of omens, divine purpose, and all that holy-roller, Bible thumping, higher power, higher purpose mumbo jumbo. The only thing we’re destined to do in this life is: live, breed, die. Rinse and repeat. My mindset has always been: if it was an omen from birth, how come nobody has figured it out for hundreds of years?
It’s because it’s all bullshit – point blank, pure and simple bullshit. We have a knack of explaining away all things that we don’t understand or cannot logically answer definitively as divine—as destiny—as fate. I think the truth and heart of the matter is that we really do not know. In order for us to justify the life of Genghis, as well as with many other historical figures, we attempt to decipher what we do know, or think we know, and place it in the hands of the one thing you could neither prove nor disprove: God. This man that went on to conquer the world, or at least what he knew of the world, was just that, a man.
It wasn’t until recent years that I’ve had multitudes of time on my hands to sit and reflect – to hermit myself within my own mind and really think about past, present and future—who I am, where I came from and where I want to go—attempting to discover myself. In my journey of self-realization, I couldn’t resist the comparison with Genghis Khan—not his whole life, not his accomplishments—just bits and pieces. Especially the beginning, when he was still just Temujin. I am no Genghis, but I can relate to aspects of his life over eight centuries prior to my own time – my own birth.
I still am on the fence as far as omens or divine purpose are concerned. If fate is real, she is a cruel, cruel woman. With time, I’ve slowly come to terms with the possibility that these things exist. I’ve witnessed enough crazy in my life to know anything is possible. But is it possible to decipher one’s own destiny from birth without allowing them to first walk through life among men? That would be absurd.
None could have known that Genghis would have united his people or conquered continents. So then is it still destiny? Or is it a way for us to deal with reality – passing the buck onto an unseen entity, you could not prove exists. What would have been said of this omen had he died in his youth as he struggled for his survival – his existence. It could be said he was destined to die young. Realistically they would have said nothing because he would not have made his mark upon this earth.
He would have died tragically young like so many others in that era. What if he had survived, but led a different life? What if he was a sheep herder or eunuch? How would the historians twist the story in that case? The answer is simple. They wouldn’t have. Time and history would have passed him by. He would have passed through this world relatively unnoticed – just like the majority of us.
I came into this world some 827 years later, thousands of miles away on a different continent on the other side of the world. I was to be born in the fall, the year of the Rat on that same ancient calendar of twelve beasts. I did not slide from my mother’s womb kicking and screaming or clutching a clot of blood in my tiny little fist.
In fact, I wasn’t kicking or screaming at all. As the hideous creature that was I, tried to break free of my mother’s womb, the doctors took it upon themselves to play god. Much to my agonized mother’s discomfort and protest, I was shoved back inside. Access denied. Next came a scalpel alongside my tiny infant throat. Time to return the vile beast back to the furthest depths of hell from whence he came, before he could breathe in the clean air of this earth poisoning this world with a single exhale. The scalpel to my throat, the cut was made.
When the doctors extracted my lifeless corpse from my mother’s womb, my body limp and unmoving, my head was black and purple – a little unusual given that neither parent was black, let alone dark complexioned. The rest of my carcass was the reddish pink of a newborn corpse. Eventually, as my lifeblood moved through my veins, I gasped for air.
It lives. The monster. Mommie’s little monster lives.
Hours earlier, and about twenty five miles to the north is the small rural town of Locust Grove, Oklahoma named after both the groves of locust trees as well as the large grasshopper-like insect that inhabits the land. A few miles out from the highway on Iron Post Road, past the little old one room schoolhouse that my father attended in his youth – on a little further and down an old red dirt road is Granny’s house.
Granny Virgie was the hub for the Fogleman clan, the glue that kept the family pulled together – where the coffee was always on, the food was plentiful and a log was always on the fire. Granny’s land stretched from one end of the dirt road to the other – no neighbors as far as the eye can see.
The nights were quiet beyond the sounds of mother nature herself: the occasional yelp and howl of a coyote; screech of the nocturnal bats swooping through the skies in hot pursuit of food; the steady hypnotizing chirping and croaking of the locusts and frogs. Nights were actually dark, as dark as pitch on a cloudy night, but on those clear nights, the stars shone the brightest you’ve ever seen – so bright and clear. It would be impossible to count the lights of distant suns in the night sky.
Carol, my mom, was only twenty one at this time and ready to burst. I was going to be child number two. Two years prior mom gave birth to my brother Michael the day after her nineteenth birthday. I heard dad drove all the way from Texas so my brother could be born in Oklahoma.
Meanwhile, back at Granny’s, mom was craving something to eat. Around the back of Granny’s place stood an apple tree ripe with the season’s delicious fruit. Mom, in her own ripened state, couldn’t resist temptation of those fresh off the tree, homegrown sweet apples. Still, the only way to get to the fruit was to go over or under the barbed wire fence that blocked her path. Granny told her to just wait a little while. It was close to supper time anyway. Those fresh apples were as tempting to a pregnant woman as drugs to an addict – just need a taste.
So there was mamma, around the back of Granny’s house, nine months pregnant with ours truly, and faced with a predicament. Never a girl to back down from a challenge or obstacle, she ducked, squatting between the wires on the fence. She victoriously plucked that sweet prize from the branches of Granny’s apple tree and ducked back through the fence. Like most things in life, one is seldom, if ever, enough. She had to have another – under the wire – pluck the prize and return, ducking under the fence.
At about which point little ole mini-me began doing cartwheels in mother’s belly – to punch, kick, bite and claw at anything I could reach, bellowing a mighty roar, a scream of bubbles because this stupid sack of embryonic fluid that I’ve been swimming, pissing and shitting in for nine months kept denying my release from my embryonic prison – punching, kicking, lungs, liver, kidneys, whatever I could reach, trying to claw her eyes out from the inside. But she was killing me – literally. Everytime she ducked beneath that barbed wire fence to pluck an apple from the tree, she was inadvertently wrapping the umbilical cord around my neck – loop after loop after loop. I was being choked to death before I ever had a chance at life – struggling for survival – struggling for my existence in a world I had never known.
I was born in the fall in the year of the rat on that ancient calendar of twelve beasts – not clutching a clot of blood, but with the life being choked from my tiny six pound eight ounce body and a blade at my throat.
Looking back, reliving life within the confines of my mind, where I can control time, knowing that the life I’ve had, how could that not have been an omen of what’s to come?
As I read the story of Temugin with the clot of blood in his right hand, I can’t help but think that maybe I’ve been wrong this whole time. Perhaps our lives are pre ordained. Perchance there is a higher purpose for each of us. Maybe, just maybe, fate is so cruel as to allow us a chance, against all odds, to live – to grow into the best, or worst, we could possibly be. Our pain and suffering enables us, permits us to learn, heal, grow stronger in our hearts and minds; to allow us the tools necessary to deal with this world we are thrust upon.
If the birth of Temujin, clutching a clot of blood in his right hand was an omen of death and destruction, then my own birth in the fall, in the year of the rat, with the life being strangled from my tiny body, a blade at my throat, must also be an omen. The implication appears clear enough that I was destined to perpetually fall, to choke and crawl through life – to hurt, struggle and bleed.
Perhaps, if God does exist, I was fatally flawed from the start; not intended to survive the complications of birth. If not for the doctors playing at god, I likely wouldn’t be writing these words. Was that my intended destiny? Was I a message for my mother’s or father’s sins? Not only did I almost lose my life at birth, I stole any possibility of my mother creating another. I am the monster who, to insure my own life, my own survival and existence, denied my mother the gift of giving life to another. Such greed. Such selfishness.
