My name is Namredef, that's my real name, I'm a story-teller, a professional story-teller. I go around telling stories to anyone who cares to listen. You could say I'm a sort of modern troubadour. I've been telling stories, I mean full-time, for money even, for the past fifty years or so. People tell me I tell good stories, though sometimes I wonder if they really mean it, or if in fact they really listen to me when I tell my stories.

The problem with being a story-teller is that after a while you have a tendency to repeat yourself. After all, there are not that many good stories to tell, and when you're the kind of story-teller who draws his material from his own life, as I always do, an autobiographical story-teller you might say, then you are limited by the facts of your life. Of course, you can always distort, exaggerate, romanticize these facts, invent a little, because in my opinion there is little difference between what really happened to you and what you imagine happened to you, but nonetheless you are limited to a certain degree by the element of credibility if you want your listeners to suspend disbelief, as it is said.

True, in my case, it so happened that because history played so many dirty tricks on me I had a rather interesting and exciting life, full of amazing experiences, some of them quite traumatic. You could say that I'm the sort of guy who somehow always manages to be in the wrong place at the wrong time so that mad preposterous situations result from this, sometimes so dramatically mad and preposterous that they become hilarious. Yes, in a sense, I am a funny story-teller, or better yet a tragicomic story-teller. Some other guy would say, Namredef you got it all wrong, it's because you were in the right place at the right time that you are able to tell us all these fabulous stories. Your life is like a book. Your life is a story. Of course that's a matter of personal opinion and point of view. But even if my life is a book, it is not an endless book, and after a while, like everyone else, I run out of stories and so I keep telling the same damn story over and over again, and I'm never sure if I haven't already told the story I'm in the process of telling to the people who are listening to me, and if they are simply being polite and pretending not to have heard my story before. It's like the guy who starts telling you a joke and asks if you've heard it before, and you say you haven't even though when the guy starts telling his joke you immediately know that you've heard it before but you say you haven't and let the guy go on, and you even laugh at the end, a little false laugh, just not to offend him.

Yes, the problem is that like all other story-tellers, I run out of stories to tell. I could, of course, like many of them do, borrow a story from another story-teller, or from a book, and just retell that story in my own way. I could easily retell, for instance, if I wanted to, the story of Ulysses, or the story of Pinocchio, or the story of Simbad the Sailor, or the story of Scheherazade (that's a good one) who keeps on telling stories just not to die. A lot of story-tellers do that, borrow stories from other story-tellers simply because they don't have stories of their own, or are afraid to tell the story of their own life. I'm not like that, you cannot accuse me of being a borrower of stories, a plagiarist, unless retelling your own story over and over again is a form of plagiarism. Me, I like to tell real stories, I mean stories that have been lived in the real world rather than read somewhere in a book. Stories of real lives rather than fictitious lives.

So if you care to listen I'll now tell you a story, my story, but first give me a couple of minutes to go to the bathroom, I have to take a leak, but stick around, and when I come back I'll tell you a great story.

Ahaha, I got you, I was just kidding, I don't have to go, you guys fell for it. This is just fiction, it has nothing to do with reality.

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