This week on Slog, we’re looking back at a few of our favorite blog posts from the year. Next up, I want to share this post written by The Stranger‘s resident philosopher, Charles Mudede.

As I’m sure you know, no one writes quite like Charles. He can write an obituary for one of the Ave’s favorite institutions while simultaneously writing good TV criticism about a sitcom from the late ’70s. It’s the type of writing you really can’t find anywhere else—if you can, please DM me, because I’d love to read it.

Reader support is what enables The Stranger’s dedicated six-person editorial team to continue bringing you the progressive and humorous journalism that documents our region. This year, we’re asking you to give yourself and Seattle the gift of The Stranger. You can even gift it to a friend! Make a contribution in their name, and we’ll send them a personalized thank you note.

Thanks, and enjoy Charles’s post, re-upped below. —Eds. Note

Originally published on July 23, 2020.
This pic of Gabriel Bogart working at the College Inn Pub is called Bad Day Cure.

This pic of Gabriel Bogart working at the College Inn Pub is called “Bad Day Cure.” Cydne Zabel

This is really bad. It’s easy for me to imagine a Seattle with no Starbucks or Pike Place Market. But it’s next to impossible for me to imagine a Seattle with no College Inn Pub. What kind of place is this? The wood-warm bar, the professors and students chatting in booths, the low ceiling. All of this boozy richness, which was in the basement of a University District hotel, the Tudor style College Inn, that has two floors above its lobby and street-level businesses, did not survive the pandemic.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...