This tape opens with what sounds like a cheap local radio ad for World of Bowling — a chaotic pitch about “hard or soft balls” that fades into a conversation so derailed it feels like a hallucination in real time. The interviewer tries to talk about bowling, but in Bootstuck, “bowling” apparently involves rolling people down a hill and occasionally throwing Caleb at the problem.

From there, the discussion drifts through roosters in boxes, gardens full of “purple kush lilacs,” and the revelation that Bootstuck’s solution to its drug problem was to simply give everyone the drugs. The town is reportedly “under wraps,” which seems to mean “hallucinating together.” Soon, people are catching stars, walking on their hands, and opening metaphorical — and literal — “polka dot doors.”

By the time the tape winds down, reality itself begins to blur. A looping fragment of the conversation dissolves into a strange, hypnotic song — a patchwork of sampled voices, laughter, and background noise that feels like it’s being transmitted from inside a mushroom cloud. It’s impossible to tell where the music starts or the talking ends, but it evokes the unsettling, kaleidoscopic drift of Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage.”

The result is one of Bootstuck’s most disorienting and strangely beautiful recordings — a descent into the township’s collective, psychedelic mind.

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The tape begins with a voicemail — a jumble of static, mumbling, and the distinct sound of someone explaining how to “fix” a cassette with a pencil and a wiggle. From there, the conversation slides straight into Bootstuck logic: juice made from pinecones, acorns, and possibly corn itself.

Soon the townsfolk are preoccupied with a new community effort — putting up lost cat posters around town. The posters, placed two feet high so the missing feline might “see them,” are an act of optimism more than strategy. From there, talk turns to the township’s new “no passing” rule — not for vehicles, but for joints — and the alleged health benefits of mushroom gravy breakfasts.

The episode closes on a high-minded note as Bootstuck’s residents describe their scientific testing methods: paper, pencils, and a race down a hill to see whose “results” travel farthest. The conclusion? Science, like most things in Bootstuck, is mostly guesswork.

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Bootstuck receives another baffling shipment — one that somehow contains blank coins with holes, six violins (or possibly chair parts), an unidentified handled object, and an alarming number of beans. Between coughing up a real frog mid-conversation and debating how to “screw violins together,” the townsfolk attempt to make sense of their new supplies. They even claim to have a refrigerator — though it doesn’t run and functions mostly as a bookshelf.

Somewhere between food safety and symphony, the group plans to teach the township how to identify edible mushrooms, a noble idea given how often everyone seems to be poisoned. The call ends with their usual abrupt sign-off ritual, and the faint sense that Bootstuck might just survive another day — on beans alone.

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