The only person who could ever make me hate Friday

It's truly, truly unbelievable.

Every day of the week, when I exit my metro stop, there is always a different musician at the top of the escalator--playing some familiar song and holding out the hat, as it were. They have varying degrees of talent--there's an awesome guy called Banjo Dan (The Banjo Man) and a man who plays the Spanish Guitar (and wears his hat tipped down over his eyes). There's a man who plays the guitar and lays all of his crazy sort of half-decent splatter paintings on the ground in front of him (we saw him again tonight outside of the baseball park--the Nats beat the Dodgers).

Among the not-so-winning musicians is a t-shirt wearing dude who I think might have found his sax in a dumpster. He stands across the street and plays what I imagine Homer Simpson might play if you handed him a saxophone. It's fairly terrible. I'm almost certain all of his earnings are pity donations. But he's at least funny.

In general, these people range from "this is a treat" to "well that was interesting" but there is one, mother-effing-son-of-a... I hate this guy. I call him the Light-Jazz-Syntho-Dredlock-Asshole. Imagine if you a will, a musician with the ability to use joy to single-handedly ruin every single Friday morning of your life. He's like an ambush, because I always forget that he's going to be there until I've already swiped my metro card and I have no way to get out of the metro without going past him.

He stands at the top of the escalator and plays his god-forsaken synthetic keyboard renditions of casino hits like "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" and "What the World Needs Now (is Love)" and lots of other cheesy, Bacharachy gems that get stuck in your head just at the completely utterly wrong time of your life.

It's Friday, for God's sake. Don't bore me into a coma just when I was feeling good about things, Man. And he'll stop in the middle of the song to utter in this breathy voice "I hope you all are having a blessed, blessed day" and "sometimes when the world has got you down..." He wears sunglasses for no reason. Why does he have dredlocks if he's singing the kind of lite pop music that grocery stores pump in at low volumes to psych people out of shoplifting? Are they even real?

And the "music" is so insanely, unreasonably, institutionally loud. It starts all the way on the train platform as an atonal murmur and by the time you're up the escalator it's drown out whatever legitimate music you've been listening to (or thought you might have been having) and replaced it with canned happiness of the smarmiest most unavoidable kind. It follows you up the block.

The irony of how irate this makes me does not escape me.

And I have no idea what it is, but for the first time in my life, I actually get the physical urge every single Friday morning to go over and kick his keyboard off its stand, smash his amp with his mic stand, throw the keyboard in front of a passing bus, shake my finger in his face and tell him that he actually owes me fifty dollars for ruining every single Friday morning for the past year of my life.

I would feel guilty about these terrible thoughts except that I'm certain that everyone else must feel the same way, but they're all wearing business casual so they can't flip shit. I'm not heartless. I love Banjo Man and awesome Chinese plucky music guy--even teenage flute kid doesn't bother me for the 35 seconds I hear these people one day a week.

But something makes me want to offer Banjo Dan a crisp c note to start a turf war. And if Light-Jazz-Syntho-Dredlock-Asshole doesn't redeem himself or disappear himself soon I might do it.

UPDATE: God does create miracles for the weary; for the first time in months, not was Light-Jazz-Syntho-Dredlock-Asshole not there this Friday, Crazy-Angry-Jesus-Bullhorn-Yeller and Gypsy-Rambling-Frank-Synatra-Loving-Lady weren't there either. Just a bunch of casuall dressed people on a rainy Friday morning before a long weekend. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh...