Fear And Loathing In Denmark,
Part The Third.

Joking Is Serious Business

She was gonna be a compassionate cop
and I was gonna be a drunk.
This was about 5 years ago.
We weren't in love, per se, really.
A mutual affinity, sure.
But not only was she spoken for,
I was a "Head for the bottom of the bottle"-kind of ingrate.
Yeah, I'm still drinking, right now as I'm writing this, in fact,
but there are levels of obliviousness, if you catch my drift.
I remember waking up after a party
at the home of a mutual friend...
I went straight for the leftover gin
as the sun was still struggling its way over the horizon.
She and I woke up simultaneously.
Four other bodies snored next to us.
We had a... heart-to-heart-mind-to-mind conversation.
The kind that, even when the actual words fade into sepia-photograph blurriness,
the meaning and importance of it lingers.
She put it so eloquently:
"Michael, I can never tell if you're being serious or if you're making a joke".

That is a sentence (both figuratively and literally)
that has haunted me since (and -before- I heard it expressed, come to think of it).

When do you cross the line?
And, more importantly, perhaps, where do you -mark- the line?

I still can't think of an adequate answer.