Now this is a beautiful day, a day of cute boys in short pants. I am consumed with Seasonal Affective Desire but I also want to read my Denton Welch book in the sun. Could Belle and Sebastian exist without Denton Welch? This is the kind of day when inchoate omnidirectional lust comes out of hibernation and lays waste to the flimsily-constructed sham called my adult sensibility.

There's a church near here, a faux stone thing, which used to be called the Staub Congregational, and then it was for sale for a few months, and now a family lives in it. They put up basketball hoops in the parking lot, and I sometimes see this cute kid out there shooting baskets. This is really a waste of a cute kid, because this family is apparently in thrall to legendary cable access nutjob Dr. Gene Scott. I have an urge to rescue this kid and deprogram him, I'm like a twisted pied piper, only leading the cute ones. Anyway, this church has a sign on its door announcing "University Chapel" services every Sunday, "sermons" delivered by Gene Scott via satellite. I used to stay up late at night to watch this sleazebag's incoherent monologues, hostile paranoid rants mingled with hilariously aggressive demands for cash donations. I was mesmerized by the vile chewed tip of his ever-present stogie, always there glistening obscenely with the camera in absurdly tight closeup, and by the fact that it took him about six hours to finish one sentence, with comically long pauses between words. He'd stop talking mid-sentence, as if waiting out a sudden nonexistent commercial break, staring blankly through his amber-tinted glasses while sucking this wet cigar, then at some point resume speaking, either picking up his previous thought or randomly launching into a new unrelated subject. Fabulous, better than Brother Theodore. If you watched him stoned you'd be sucked into this weird Gene Scott time vortex, he'd utter maybe three sentences but hours would go by.