Gabriel Jeroschewitz, July 2nd, 2025, Dedicated to Robert, Edler von Musil. PG has a few naughty words.

She slides onto the stool next to me, a faint scent of ozone and desperation trailing behind her.

Picture this: I’m sitting in a dimly lit bar, all chipped mahogany and questionable stains. The air’s thick with the ghosts of bad decisions and stale beer. I’m nursing a bourbon, neat – gotta keep the palate clean for what’s coming. Then, she walks in. She’s not just any stranger, but a figure from my past, a friend I haven’t seen in years.

Not an entrance, mind you, more like a goddamn apparition. Short black dress, the kind that screams, “I’m here to collect your soul, and I’m doing it in style.” Red stilettos, six inches of pure, unadulterated fuck you to gravity. And the face… well, the face is surprisingly… human. Beautiful, even if you could ignore the glint in her eyes that says she knows exactly how many grains of sand are left in your hourglass. It’s ironic how someone who looks so put together can be in such an existential crisis.

She slides onto the stool next to me, a faint scent of ozone and desperation trailing behind her. “Whiskey,” she barks at the bartender, not bothering to make eye contact. “And make it snappy, I haven’t got all eternity.”

I take a long swig of my bourbon. “Let me guess,” I say, the words slurring just a tad, “You’re here to tell me I’m… overdue?”

She turns, and that glint in her eye sharpens. “Overdue? Darling, you haven’t even lived yet. You’ve been sleepwalking through existence, mouthing platitudes like a goddamn parrot. Overdue implies you had something to deliver. You’re just… behind.”

Her whiskey arrives, and she downs it in one go. “Look,” she says, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, “Call me… Mort. Look, I’ve been reading this book, right? This goddamn brick by Musil. The Man Without Qualities. Ever heard of it?”

I nod slowly, trying to keep up with the hairpin turns of this conversation. “A philosopher friend once joked that reading it is like having a long, elegant conversation with a ghost who insists you sit still until the world makes sense.”

Mort snaps her fingers. “Exactly! Bloody brilliant. Except, Musil’s ghost is wearing sensible brogues and a tweed jacket. I figured I could spice things up a bit.” She gestures to her outfit with a flourish. “Gotta keep the clientele entertained, you know? Especially the ones on the existential edge.”

I raise an eyebrow. “So, you’re… Grim Reaper goes Gonzo?”

She laughs, a sharp, brittle sound. “Something like that. See, this Ulrich guy, right? This ‘man without qualities’? He’s got it pegged. The world’s falling apart, empires are crumbling, and everyone’s running around trying to find meaning in… what? Political rallies? Love affairs? Charity bazaars? Pathetic.”

“And you think Musil skewers it all?”

“Skewer? He eviscerates! He takes the piss out of every single pompous, self-important windbag who thinks they’ve got the answers. Diotima, Arnheim, and bloody General Stumm are all just case studies in human delusion! And Ulrich? He’s just standing there, watching it all burn, because he refuses to play along. He’s a goddamn rebel!”

She orders another whiskey. “The thing is,” she continues, leaning closer, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “I’m starting to feel it, too. This… this emptiness. I used to think it was just the job. You know, escorting souls to the afterlife, a bit like being a high-end concierge for the dead. But now… now I’m questioning everything. What’s the point? What’s the point of any of it? I’m not just questioning the purpose of my job, but the purpose of life itself.”

I take another sip of my bourbon. “Sounds like an existential crisis, Mort.”

“Crisis? Please! It’s a goddamn meltdown! I’m starting to understand Ulrich’s refusal to commit. To anything! Politics, love, belief – it’s all a bunch of bullshit designed to distract us from the fact that we’re all just hurtling towards oblivion! Musil understands that. He gets it! It’s all about possibility, not conclusion. It’s all about the journey, not the destination.”

She pauses, staring into her whiskey. “And that sister of his – Agathe? Don’t even get me started. That taboo-tinged relationship? That yearning for something real, something beyond the intellectual masturbation of the Viennese elite? It’s heartbreaking! It’s a tragedy, a poignant portrayal of searching for intimacy in a world destined for disintegration.”

“So, you’re finding solace in a book about the disintegration of everything?”

“Solace? No! Recognition! Musil doesn’t give you answers; he gives you better questions. He throws you into a maze of ideas, a labyrinth of doubt. And in each room, you catch a glimpse of something… real. The beauty of uncertainty, the dignity of complexity.”

She sighs, running a hand through her perfectly coiffed hair. “And the unfinished nature of it all… It’s perfect! Life’s unfinished. A constant interruption. Musil gets it!

She looks at me, her eyes suddenly clear and focused. “Reading this book is like walking through a city you thought you knew, only to find unfamiliar doors on every street. It forces you to confront your bullshit, to question your own so-called beliefs. It’s not a book for everyone, I’ll grant you that, but for the ones willing to meet it on its terms, it’s a goddamn companion. A difficult one, sure, but a necessary one! You know, in times when certainty feels dishonest, and simplicity feels like betrayal.”

She finishes her whiskey and stands up, towering over me in ridiculous heels. “Anyway,” she says, a wry smile on her lips. “I’ve got souls to collect. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll suggest they read The Man Without Qualities on their way to the other side. Might give them something to think about.”

She turns to leave, her short black dress swaying with each step. As she reaches the door, she pauses and looks back at me. “Remember,” she says, her voice barely a whisper, “a life examined is rarely tidy, but it can still be luminous, even in its incompleteness. With that, she disappears into the night, leaving me with my bourbon and a lot to think about. I drain my glass, the liquor burning a path down my throat. Maybe she’s right. Perhaps we’re all just sleepwalking. But maybe, just maybe, there’s still time to wake up. Even if the Grim Reaper has to dress like Hunter S. Thompson or Kate Moss to get the message across.

Gabriel Jeroschewitz, July 1st, 2025. Inspired by Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, and Tom Waits, humanity is kept alive. From the Three Penny Opera, the author has abridged the story to keep it from being overkill.

Ah, humans. Please just sit down, if you can remain still for more than ten seconds without checking a small, glowing rectangle or scratching an inexplicable itch. I would like to tell you about humans.

I’ve been observing things for a while now. A very long time. Longer than mountains have been mountains, certainly longer than oceans, decided where they wanted to sit that eon. And in all the swirling cosmic nonsense, the grand ballet of creation and decay, the sudden, inexplicable appearance of things where there was nothing, and the equally bewildering disappearance of things that seemed quite sturdy – nothing, absolutely nothing, is as perplexing, and frankly, as riotously funny, as the human insistence on its logic.

“We are rational beings,” they puff out their chests and declare. “We think, therefore we are.” Oh, they think all right. They think they’re in charge. They think they understand. They think they make sense. It’s adorable like a particularly confident squirrel trying to explain quantum physics while burying a nut in a flowerpot.

Because, observe them. Watch them navigate their day. They wake up, often at a time dictated by an artificial construct called a “job,” for which they exchange their time for pieces of coloured paper or numbers in a digital ledger, which they then use to acquire things they often don’t need, to impress people they usually don’t like. Logical? Where exactly does the logic enter this transaction chain, beyond the primal urge for survival twisted into elaborate games of status?

Consider their priorities. They will spend years acquiring elaborate mating rituals involving expensive shiny objects or cleverly worded phrases to obscure their intentions. They will dedicate immense brainpower to devising complex game rules involving balls or little plastic figures. They will then expend vast emotional energy arguing whether a rule was followed correctly. Meanwhile, the air they breathe warps, the water they drink becomes questionable, and they invent new and exciting ways to be miserable while pursuing “happiness” with single-minded, illogical fervour.

You hear them, too, in their little pronouncements. “We must address the seven deadly sins!” they cry, often the ones who have just had a particularly satisfying second helping of something rich or spent a weekend in bed. They wring their hands about Gluttony and Sloth and Pride, as if these are abstract concepts that arrived via ill wind, rather than inherent, almost delightful, consequences of being a creature built from the universe’s leftover creative energy mixed with impulse control issues.

One old, cynical poem I overheard them muttering once had it roughly right: gentlemen who preach about morals should focus on getting everyone fed first. Because the human capacity for altruism and lofty ideals seems directly proportional to how recently they’ve had a decent meal and how comfortable their shoes are. A hungry human, cold one, or simply one whose daily commute is irritating, is often a creature whose grip on their proclaimed rationality is tenuous at best, and whose inner beast taps impatiently on the cage bars.

They rose from the primordial chaos, a bubbling stew of elements and improbable reactions, guided by nothing so much as chance collisions and the urgent, illogical drive to replicate. And into a state of chaotic interaction they will undoubtedly return, individually and perhaps eventually collectively. Their cities are monuments to attempted order, grids and schedules and traffic lights, all overlaid upon the unpredictable, often bizarre behaviour of the individuals within them. Watch their roads – rivers of metal guided by beings simultaneously listening to music, shouting into a phone, thinking about what’s for dinner, and convinced everyone else on the road is an imbecile. I don’t know what it is if that’s not a microcosm of ordered chaos.

And this duality! This breathtaking, baffling duality! They are capable, oh yes, they are capable of astonishing acts of beauty. They produce sounds that can make your non-existent heart ache, images that capture light in ways that defy probability, and structures that reach for the sky with elegant defiance. They can show incredible tenderness, sacrificing their comfort for the well-being of another, human or otherwise. They can feel empathy, connect across impossible divides, and create intricate tapestries of relationships and shared meaning. They are, truly, capable of being the most wonderful, beautiful things.

And then… oh dear. Then there’s the flip side that proves they haven’t strayed quite as far from the muck as they like to pretend. The casual cruelty they inflict upon each other and the planet that sustains them. The way power seems to curdle their reason, turning them into preening, posturing figures obsessed with dominance. The sheer pettiness! They will wage wars over invisible lines on maps, persecute neighbours over differing opinions on mythology, and sabotage colleagues over the slightest perceived slight or the chance of a fractional increase in their paper/number hoard.

They talk of keeping humanity alive through brilliance; they have flashes of it. But truthfully, as that poem hinted, humanity often survives not despite its darker nature, but because of it, or at least alongside it. The drive to compete, to hoard resources, to defend one’s territory – these are not rational choices, they are primal urges, ancient echoes of the beast that lived before the logic story was invented. Their ability to repress their inherent chaos and bestiality is patchy at best, and often it’s the exercise of these ‘bestial acts’ on a grand or petty scale that dictates who gets the food, who gets the shelter, who survives. Survival isn’t always a clean, logical process; it’s often messy, brutal, and deeply illogical from an ‘enlightened’ perspective. They are kept alive, in part, by maintaining a delicate, unstable truce with their inner animal, a repression that occasionally fails.

So why, you might ask, do they cling so fiercely to this notion of being logical? Perhaps it’s a comfort blanket. A way to feel special, distinct from the animals they pen up or romanticize from a safe distance. Maybe it’s a necessary illusion, the scaffolding that prevents them from collapsing into outright, gibbering madness when faced with the undeniable evidence of their chaotic nature. Perhaps admitting they are simply complex arrangements of stardust and impulse, capable of writing a sonnet in the morning and keying a car in the afternoon, is too much to bear.

Whatever the reason, watching them strive for order while inherently being creatures of chaos is a constant, unfolding comedy. They build intricate plans that are immediately undone by a sudden mood swing or the arrival of doughnuts. They declare universal truths based on particular, fleeting personal experiences. They yearn for peace while perfecting the art of passive-aggressive warfare in staff meetings.

They are illogical, chaotic, sometimes horrifyingly bestial, and capable of breathtaking beauty. They are the universe’s most entertaining paradox, a walking, talking, often tripping, contradiction. And they think they’re logical. It’s magnificently absurd. And in that absurdity, in that beautiful, terrible, funny mess, perhaps that’s where their truth lies. Not in the logic they preach, but in the glorious, unpredictable chaos from which they came, and to which, with any luck, they will return with suitable dramatic flair. It’s certainly never boring to watch. Never, ever dull.