I just found out that the guy who makes "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't" is also and ex NYC bike messenger (like me) and somehow this just ... it explains so much.
Being a messenger causes you to see the city from a rare vantage point. You feel like a blood cell in a vast gothic organism. But it also engenders a kind of fundamental cantankerousness that makes for the strangest kind of naturalist perspective.
I should write more about that some time...