.jpg)
The Unorganized Township of Bootstuck
An old box of randomly labelled cassette tapes is liberated from a garage sale and into the hands of a journalist who begins sifting through the contents and discovers random interviews with the citizens of a remote town known only as Bootstuck, a distant former military base in Ontario's northernmost region. The characters that occupy this abandoned outpost are colourful to be polite, unstable, unpredictable, or erratic to be direct but have all bypassed their obvious intellectual shortcomings to suss out an existence in this wild and challenging place.
The Unorganized Township of Bootstuck
TAPE 4 - Sitting on a Strangers Meat
Tape 4 drifts away from interviews and into what sounds like an unscripted, unfiltered conversation between Hat Guy and a new, unnamed voice. No introductions, no explanations—just two minds meeting in the middle of nowhere.
The topic? Microwaves. Specifically, how to use one properly… or, in Hat Guy’s case, how to absolutely not. His methods are, at best, unconventional—and at worst, a health hazard. Our new speaker doesn’t seem fazed, which says a lot about the intellectual ecosystem in Bootstuck.
The cast keeps expanding, but the facts remain elusive. No coordinates, no dates, no clue why these tapes exist. Just more voices, more static, and the growing sense that we might be chasing a whole lot of something that leads absolutely nowhere.
Still, the tapes keep coming—and so do the questions.
www.bootstuck.com
you sound discombobulated there are
SPEAKER_00:you all right yeah yeah there's
SPEAKER_02:got some marijuana in my throat You know, I don't support it by the... Some of the people were thinking it was one of their good sources of alternative income.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you can probably grow this stuff and sell it at the back of the boutique.
SPEAKER_02:You'd have to think. You'd have to think. You'd have to think.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I don't have to think. I have three guys on the board of committees that do it for me.
SPEAKER_02:You know what I could use?
SPEAKER_00:Tell me now. A chair. A cheddar. I've got a chair. Cheddar cheese? You like the cheddar cheese? No, a chair. Oh, yeah. You don't sit on the cheese. No. Well, you can. Well, someone's going to just make a silly joke, say you cut the cheese. You're going to have to laugh, even though you know it ain't funny.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you've got to ask yourself questions about whether you want to put something in your mouth that you've been sitting on a long
SPEAKER_00:time. That's true, too. I wouldn't have even thought about that, because last time I had meatballs, I was sitting on a package of meatballs, So Dave said, sit down here and thaw these out for me, why don't you? So I did. And then I guess we had them for dinner.
SPEAKER_02:You sat on the meatballs?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, nicely. Well, he told me he wanted to thaw them out. Then I froze them. Well, how long did you sit on them for? An hour and a half. Well, that's just not right. You can't sit on meat. Had pants on. Had underpants on, too. Two layers. I've
SPEAKER_02:eaten at your
SPEAKER_00:house. Yeah, but this is at Dave's house. I don't do that. I wash my lettuce in the shower.
SPEAKER_02:Wait a minute. You're sitting on other people's meat. This can go wrong real quickly.
SPEAKER_00:No, I don't sit on other people's meat. I just move the meat off to the side so when I sit down, it's just tucked nicely beside me.
SPEAKER_02:Have you heard of a
SPEAKER_00:microwave? Mm-hmm. It's only for popcorn. Popcorn button right there.
UNKNOWN:Oh.
SPEAKER_00:Hang on now. I'm going to look. Popcorn, soda pop. Soda pop? Soda pop. Oh, defrost. Right there. Look at that. You
SPEAKER_02:thought it was French, right?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I wasn't real sure. You know, I only use the popcorn button.
SPEAKER_02:What I got's got pictures. They don't have no instructions. There's a picture of a fish and there's a picture of what looks to be a steak. or somebody's ear.
SPEAKER_00:So you just throw the bass right inside the microwave, push the fish button, and you're done?
SPEAKER_02:That's what it suggests. You can use it for drying stuff. I put my tools in there to dry them off, sometimes some slippers, underwear, anything that's wet and damp and close to me.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I heat up my pillowcase that night sometimes.
SPEAKER_02:Well, it raises the same question, though. I guess it's not the same if you're sitting on your meat versus putting the meatballs in the microwave where you put your underwear. But yeah, we don't even have a freezer where we're at. We just have a hole in the ground.
SPEAKER_00:I have six hot dogs left in my freezer.
SPEAKER_01:Well, the reason the call was is I was going to invite myself over for dinner, but upon further learnings, I decided I'll just microwave myself a savory meat pie.
SPEAKER_00:All right. Time
SPEAKER_01:to go. All right.
