miscellaneous chaos... or is it?

jeez, its been a long week, i feel like i have been run down by a bus (pun intended...) and its been an awfully desultory experience. i was sent on a charter to yankee stadium along with phil, another regular driver who visits the stadium in the ole bronx often and apparently likes the thronging horde of people and vendors and buses and cars and semis and box vans all trying to do one thing at one time in one place that seems incredible as it really isn't plausible, but it happens anyways. my first time in the bronx and what happens? i get a parking ticket and scrape the top of the bus on a low hanging tree in a side street that wasn't meant for an influx of buses and cannot help but feel a little negative towards the driver who unwittingly, got me into this mess. first off, i am not even a yankees fan and probably wouldn't be even if i knew the difference between a knuckleball and a shortstop, but then if i were it may have intervened in the off duty cop wearing the yankees tshirt, who got the on duty to write me up the offending ticket. what would you do if you were accosted by a man walking by yelling obscenties at you while you were eating lunch on a parked bus in new york? probably wouldn't think twice about and that's almost what i did until i noticed his radio and started the bus, walked to the bus in front of me to ask the first driver what he thought and where we could go if it came to moving through this sea of traffic, when he looks back inside of two minutes and says hey, you better get back to your bus... and i get the first ticket, parking or moving or otherwise that i have ever received in my 17 years of driving... with a bus, but then again, i received my first tire blow out while i was driving a bus back there on the lie. so we move and he finds a spot, i start backing into the just big enough spot behind him and what do i have? the lowest leaning tree on the street located exactly in the middle of my parking spot that is exactly out of reach of my mirrors and just hanging low enough that i manage to hear a grinding scraping two foot long sound before i can react, hit the brakes, look at the panicked face of phil, hear the yelling from the bus drivers behind me, worry about the nyc traffic swooping around the street behind me and think, jeez, wasn't i lucky that we got these spots and that i managed to so deftly avoid that low hanging branch of the tree that was behind the tree in the middle of my bus? yep, all that the fact that i had to sit with the bus for six hours without ac and a pitable amount of water to drink and two dollars to my name on me feeling like a castaway on a desert island waiting for the next ship to come by...
but lest we think that its all been motor oil and roses along the way i have the experiences of seeing only the sorts of things that can be seen on the road or in the port authority. yesterday i notice on the thruway that a car bearing quebec license plates is motoring down the road and has a very large smiley faced bedecked bumper sticker. odd that, just two car lengths behind that car is another car this time with ontario plates but with the exact same bumper sticker... what are the odds? and what are the odds that you will see two nuns getting off a bus carrying many luggage bags, sleeping bags and yellow plastic blow up swimming rings strung around their necks? not that it wasn't odd enough to see one, but two? and then again, its not as though the port authority is not inhabited by those creatures with a few more eccentricites than we bus drivers... like the old asian man who walks around collecting newspaper. he picks one up, flicks through it, occasionally looking at something that garners his attention and then carefully folds the paper (or magazine) and places it with the twenty something pounds of newspaper that he already has bundled in a plastic bag with him. is there some bounty on recycling newspaper?