you can't want always what you get

yesterday was a bit of a lose/lose situation. when i run late, it becomes a situation of diminishing returns sometimes. if i am late, then that means that the passengers are correspondingly late and if they are late, they are crabby and if they are crabby and late, chances are that i am twice as crabby and twice as late. to the chagrin of myself, i found out that after an already long day driving to oneonta and back that i had to bring the college kids that i carted from oneonta to their mysterious and exotically named long island destinations. names that belong to long forgotten indian lore like massapequa and islip to the appropriately named babylon. (how could any township be incorporated knowingly by town fathers and settlers with that name?) it was bad enough that i haven't been driving on the island that much and that whenever i go, i get this preternatural fear(?) of it and of being there. it is as if the back part of my head, the primal animal brain can sense that i am on an island that I am surrounded by water. even the long islanders, i think, sense it and so have always in my eyes been prowlers on an island, crowded in amongst one another so that they have this wild look of claustrophobia in their eyes and have a need to drive very fast as if they were escaping the impending lapping waters of the atlantic. i just know that i always feel better crossing the throgs neck bridge and suddenly i'm back on the mass of a continent.
encountering a throng of students eager to leave town in the opening days of college when the leaves are just beginning to fall in a small contained indian summer frenzy, is guaranteed to cause delays and when you encounter them in another throng when you reach your home terminal, expecting to meet a seasoned long island driver, salty and insouscient, ready to crack a bullwhip like a lion tamer and herd them on board and for you to get released, but be instead told that you will board for long island is enough to cause panic and genuine sheer dread when your trip will take you to that island and down amongst those highways and those tiny streets with a 45 foot bus... in the dark... and in the rain.
in the dark when you have to read your half forgotten notes and route instructions by the glaring light of the drivers light that blots out any sight from the windshield, it can make you late and it made the passengers late and well, see above about what i've already said about lateness. one guy in particular wasn't too happy. he was going to our last stop, huntington. it seemed that he had a phone call to make or receive every thirty seconds and they would all begin the same way, 'yeah, i'm still on the bus... ' this said with a droning, i'm about to go crazy sort of ennui. yeah, i am too, i thought. i noticed a pattern to his calls, they got progressively more suicidely let down and pissed off in a sort of rich 19 year old with a bad pompadour of hair who was used to getting his own way. at one point he said that he didn't know why he didn't get off and take the paralleling to the road LIRR back home. neither did i. his conversations went like this.' yeah, i'm still on the bus. i don't know. maybe 10 o clock. maybe later. i've been on the bus since 3 o clock. (once more i felt like turning around saying that i've been on the bus since noon, what are you bitching about?) and then i heard' this is the worst (that word was drawn out in a yawning feel pity for me stretch...) worst experience of my life! (not one of my better ones either, pal...) and then he followed maybe six or seven calls up with the reminder to the listener that he had been on the bus for 7 hours and then an hour later, that figure became 9 hours and about ten minutes after that, it was up to 10 hours. (hell, i could do that standing on my head!) and then i had to drive back home. arguably not the worst experience of that night, but getting to islip was like getting passed the baton in a marathon. i still had to run for miles. but i felt better when i crossed the throgs neck and looked at the massive rusting columns of the sky blue beams and out into that expanse of dark dark night blue water and thought of the atlantic and the many miles that i had already come. i was off the island.