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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 5 - Governance. Sort of...
Tape 5 takes a surprising turn. What started as a handful of strange voices in a foggy fishing village now hints at something more structured—dare I say organized. This is the longest, most revealing recording yet, and for once, we get a name.
Meet Don. He’s the previously unnamed voice from Tape 4, and apparently, he’s got some sway in Bootstuck. Don talks local governance, suggests electing a mayor, and even floats the idea of town council meetings to hear pitches from developers. Suddenly, Bootstuck sounds less like a campfire fever dream and more like an actual, if deeply bizarre, township.
Hat Guy, of course, derails everything by claiming to work at three big box stores at once and confusing the development pitch process with... a musical performance. It's unclear whether he's joking or if this is just how he sees the world.
Still, progress is progress. Bootstuck is starting to take shape—but its people? They’ll need a bit more scrutiny.
www.bootstuck.com
There
SPEAKER_02:he is.
SPEAKER_01:Hey, Don. How y'all doing? It's been a minute or seven, ain't it, Vin? They
SPEAKER_02:got one of them there Fitbits.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah? Them doohickey thing you put over your neck there? That guy?
SPEAKER_02:No, you put it on your
SPEAKER_01:wrist.
SPEAKER_02:You put it on your wrist there, and it tells you the time. And then it tells you everything that's going on with your insides. Even lets you know how you're feeling.
SPEAKER_01:Do you want to swallow the thing? Do you swallow it to tell you what's going on inside?
SPEAKER_02:No, you just put it on. Why would you swallow the watch? That doesn't make any sense.
SPEAKER_01:Do they know how long my intestines is?
SPEAKER_02:I don't know. I never asked. It tells you when you need to go to bed. Which my old watch used to tell me to do because I would... Take out, I look at my old watch, and I'd say, it's 10.30. That's time to go to bed.
SPEAKER_01:Tells you what to eat. Does it tell you what booger your nose is in? Boy, if you've got a lefty or a righty booger going on, it'll tell you that, because that could be dang helpful. Sometimes, I was driving in my car, and I got real picky if you said you felt it in my left nose, so I got up inside there. Fifteen minutes later, I realized that the sensation was really from the other nose.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's the craziest thing you've ever
SPEAKER_01:heard.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that don't make no sense.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'm not sure it's supposed to. Well, I've got a question before you get on with your nonsense there, Don. Did you check it off on the dead and done list?
SPEAKER_02:Well, one of the things, the first thing was to make a list. Well, I'm glad I got you on the horn, because I've got to talk to you about council. We're done with the winter, and we're getting council back up again. We've got to start having our meetings. First of all, well, we've got to pick. We don't have a mayor, and we need a treasurer. We need a secretary.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, my Lord. We're going to have to get a new population.
SPEAKER_02:Well, aren't we going to put our sales on the map? Do you think
SPEAKER_01:we're going to get a Walmart one of these days?
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's why I called, really, because one of the first people that called me was the one with Walmart here. And...
SPEAKER_01:about that. Woo! What's happening?
SPEAKER_02:They want to open up a franchisee here in Wheatstone.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:But the problem is, is they have a presentation to do, and then you can do it in front of city council. Now, I was pretty embarrassed to tell them that we have to talk to the city
SPEAKER_01:council. Why don't we just do a little mime and act for them? You know, we're all dressed up in black and white and pull a rope or
SPEAKER_02:something. No, no, we don't present to them. They're presenting to us.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, then I like them to wear tap shoes.
SPEAKER_02:What?
SPEAKER_01:I would prefer if they were to wear tap shoes. Tippy-tap, tippy-tap, all over the place. make a nice rhyming song, do a small dance, but not too jazzy, you know?
SPEAKER_02:I think that might kind of
SPEAKER_01:scare them away. Oh. Well, I don't really know what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_02:I'll move on to the next thing. The next problem is we also got a bunch of stores that want to open up here. We got a Bed, Bath& Beyond. They got a Home Depot. Oh, that
SPEAKER_01:sounds like a
SPEAKER_02:good one.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. Well, what about, like, you know, something that we can use, like a fine dining establishment? The problem with a
SPEAKER_02:lot of these stores and things is that We haven't got any people put in them, let alone to go there.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I could work three of them. I'll work at the Walmart on Wednesdays and Thursdays. And then I'll go down to the Home Depot and work there on Fridays. And then on Mondays and Sundays, I can work at the fine dining establishment. That's fine. Sounds like a good time to me. How are you
SPEAKER_02:going to run a whole Walmart by yourself?
SPEAKER_01:I haven't really thought of that. I'm just trying to be helpful. It's not like I got touched. I was going
SPEAKER_02:to say, what is going on about tap shoes? It seems a little silly.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I saw it on the radio player the other day, the little fuzzy box that I watched there. You know, when you slap it around, sometimes you get a hockey game, and sometimes you get these guys doing weird things on the fuzziness. And I saw the tippity-tap, and I said, well, something like that would be nice. You know, draw some attention.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I slap my television around all against the French channel.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's a shame. I know.
SPEAKER_02:That's the craziest thing I've ever heard.
UNKNOWN:What? Who?
SPEAKER_02:Here's what we gotta do. We gotta have ourselves a counselor. And we gotta have some... You got anybody you can call to come down?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I can call Steven. Steven will come down. He'll come down for just about anything. Even a bowl of melted ice cream. He'd come right on there.
SPEAKER_02:Well,
SPEAKER_01:he's over yonder. He's not really in... Is he from
SPEAKER_02:thereabouts or is he from yonder?
SPEAKER_01:No, he's from thereabouts, I believe. Yeah, I can give him a call quickly. Hold on a second. Steven!
SPEAKER_00:Never
SPEAKER_01:mind, he ain't answering. Boy, if he do, I'll let you know. I was born... Cell phones was a thing, but not a thing. I had a long, curly cord on my kitchen phone.
SPEAKER_02:Well, now, we had one phone
SPEAKER_01:in
SPEAKER_02:Zoot's tub, just the one phone for everybody. So we put one of them long, curly cords on there, right? No matter what you did, even if you just picked it up, said hello, go over there, put it back down, it was tangled. There was no turn time. So you had to let go and let it spin, you know. But then it would just tangle itself up overnight for no reason, nonsense.
SPEAKER_01:You ever had one of those things when you was on the telephone, started twisting your pencil inside of that phone cord? The next thing you know, you can't get it out. Nope. That was there for a week and a half, right? You remember that? Of course,
SPEAKER_02:everyone's
SPEAKER_01:got them cellular
SPEAKER_02:radio phones now with the calculator in the camera and the...
SPEAKER_01:I know, those appity-pappy things like that. Yeah, God knows all about them.
SPEAKER_02:We didn't have no apps. And everyone did use those bottom buttons. There was a zero and a star and a tic-tac-toe.
SPEAKER_01:I think it was for Batman.
SPEAKER_02:What?
SPEAKER_01:I never needed it. You know him?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, no.
SPEAKER_01:You push the button three times and then put a light onto the moon. And then a man comes with a cape real fast. He's nice, but I ain't never use it. Because that sounds like a bunch of hooey
SPEAKER_02:nonsense.
SPEAKER_01:I saw it in the movie.
SPEAKER_02:Oh. They wouldn't show it if it wasn't true.
SPEAKER_00:I don't know about that.
