Surreal moment when I picked up the food at Red Hot Szechuan. Brubeck’s “Take 5” was playing over the sound system, performed by someone on one those plaintive plucky two stringed instruments, the kind you see all talcumed up in the fingers of a street or subway player giving voice to some forgotten courtly lament from the Sung dynasty. To me, hearing that tune on that instrument was the apotheosis of something, the incongruity of this poor world never quite getting it right–flooded me with pathos for our malapropic multitudes, us poor laughably benighted fools…