No Answer. That driver, an idiot or just absentminded, has already disappeared in traffic, but his sticker’s announcement continues to gnaw at the psychologist’s mind. He takes exception to all these bumper stickers, the jewelry and printed T-shirts, the tattoos with Chinese letters of obscure meaning. Ostensibly all these branding gestures are rooted in an attempt to assert one’s identity and individuality, to escape a kind of annihilating anonymity. But the entire effort seems childish to him, exhausting, essentially anxious, and, in the final analysis, futile. The everyday is often seen as a punishment, an oppression against which one is supposed to rebel and rage; break and overthrow it with ceremonies and celebrations; delay it with speeches and exclamation points and parties and noise; cover it up in thick layers of makeup, mountains of words, loud music, and piles of food. The psychologist, however, finds comfort in the quiet murmur of the city’s daily flow, the hushed rumbling of conversation that can be understood even without listening. The psychologist prefers the quiet, gray anonymity of the kind the city lavishes kindly on its inhabitants. All these escape efforts, the hassle of planning elaborate meals and dressing up, the compulsive marking of assorted special occasions, all these are suspect in his eyes. It is, after all, in those very special moments that the everyday stubbornly rises, slippery as smoke, seeps in and latches onto consciousness. In a room filled with the scent of fresh love an ugly fly is always buzzing. Sand invades, sticky and malevolent, between the thighs of the lovers on the beach at sunset. The food cart squeals its tuneless song into the patient’s hospital room, slices the doctor’s speech somewhere between the sorry and the cancer. And here’s a dwindling roll of toilet paper, a missing set of keys, a speck of sauce splashed unknowingly on the chin, dirty dishes in the sink, mud on the heels of the shoes. The psychologist has long ago surrendered to the everyday. He likens it to a wide and fast river, silent and strong, at once moving and still. Perhaps a total acceptance of this continuous prosaic moment, he thinks, allows one to truly transcend it, to arrive at what may lie beyond.