Confessions Of A Wytche: An Autobiography

     I am an ancient soul. I have been here before, in the mortal realm, many times. I rise from the dust of ages past to dance this mad dervish we call life, only to sleep once again in the sands of time. I return from the kingdom of the dead on the southwest wind. They say the southwest wind can drive a person mad. I find that interesting.
     In this incarnation I was bastard born in Scharding, Austria on December 20, 1946 at 1:38am. It was cold. Severely cold. World War II had come to a close, but the blood and the pain was still fresh in the memories of the global population. My life has been a life of blood and pain. In the last six years before I went to rehab and cleaned myself up from thirty eight years of active addiction to drugs and alcohol, the blood and the pain was self inflicted. With fire and razor.
     On December 23rd I was taken to Stephenkirche, and there baptized into the Roman Catholic faith. There is a quaint little story told of how my father had to hold the the marble bowl of holy water beneath his military coat, in his armpit, in order to melt enough water for the priest to sprinkle my head. Humorous no doubt, but it was the first step in my spiritual journey. I was christened Philo Ornaldo Ferdinand Franz Josef Nichols. Philo is Greek. Ornaldo and Ferdinand are Spanish. Franz Josef is Austrian and Nichols is the English derivative  of the Greek name Nikolaus. I have no knowledge as to how the Greek and Spanish names came into play. My paternal grandmother was French English and my paternal grandfather German Irish. The maternal side of me is Austrian for as many generations as they can count back. So, whence came the Greek and Spanish names is beyond my ken. Perhaps I should ask my mother as she played a primary role in my naming. Either way, as you can see, Austrians have a peculiar propensity for burdening their children with multiple names. Thanks mom! However, I must confess, this strange phenomenon served me well in later years. 
    My father was stationed in Austria as a part of the military occupation of my nation after the demise of the Nazi regime, which had left it's cruel stamp of death on my mother's side. By the time those murderers were driven out, there was naught but a handful of adult women, two adult males and one male child left to that branch of the family tree. They had all died either fighting in the resistance, or being exterminated for being too outspoken and politically incorrect. The male child had a twin sister. They both disappeared in the Russian occupation sector of Vienna, to never be seen or heard from again. The two adult males both died without producing issue.