If analyzing the misdeeds of these miscreants didn’t take up so much
of my time, and if Mr. Keck were not so reliably stingy with the petty
cash, I would have long ago commissioned a study to determine exactly
what miasma of abused pharmaceuticals, malnutrition, and excessive
languor produces that wretched creature we call the Stranger staffer. Alas, it remains a vexing mystery of science (and law
enforcement). So you can imagine my joy when I read the
illiterate-dolt-to-English translation of this issue (thank you, Speedy
Trannies, Inc.; despite your specious abbreviation of the word
“translators,” you were eager and willing to take on an impossible
assignment at reasonable prices) and discovered that CHARLES MUDEDE has
produced a wonderful anthropological account of the conditions that
gave rise to one of this paper’s most notorious offenders of decent
sensibility. To wit: himself.

I suppose it should not have surprised me to learn that Mr. Mudede
rose to haunt my days out of some nightmarish cellar in Pioneer Square,
where, beginning around 1990, he failed to pay a mere $80 rent on time
and consorted with a clan of cheap-beer guzzlers and naked hippie
dunderheads (and, of course, justified it all with some nonsense about
how he hailed from the upper crust of Zimbabwean society and therefore
needed to know what it was to drink mushroom tea with blithering
idiots). Nevertheless, there are some important potential findings in
this work. For example, it has long been my assumption that Mr. Mudede
was dropped on his head as an infant, but this narrative, which
includes the revelation that Mr. Mudede maintained a blatantly illegal
habitation in the elevator shaft of said cellar, has caused me to
consider another possibility: that a collision between his sleeping
head and a descending elevator occurred sometime in his early 20s, and
that this blunt-force trauma (combined with his fondness for wine,
which you cannot begrudge a man unless he is an alcohol sponge like Mr.
Mudede) is what accounts for his general incoherence—and,
perhaps, for his idolization of Karl Marx, though I tend to believe
that more than a head injury and perpetual intoxication is required to
produce that particular outcome.

In any case, even as Mr. Mudede’s confession helpfully augments the
all-too-slim body of knowledge concerning root causes of
Stranger staffer behavior, it has also caused my lengthy tally
of prosecutable conduct to grow. What, I wonder, is the statute of
limitations on clogging the city’s underground train tunnel with a
deranged, communist-sympathizing, undocumented nonworker who believes
that he will hear Hume’s voice of God somewhere inside this important
freight thoroughfare? How about “microwaving a moist marijuana leaf for
breakfast”? Or disclosing vital military secrets about experiments on
giant bees at the Grand Island, Nebraska, military installation? I will
be finding out shortly, you may be assured.