When Dirtlease first bought its parks, the Founder would post long essays about galvanized water pipe and Orangeburg septic pipe. Galvanized pipe rusts and corrodes. Orangeburg, which is tar-infused cardboard, collapses. The posts were meditations on entropy, memory, perception, and the hidden nature of things. The way materials would degrade was a proxy for the …
When the Founder travelled to the Dirtlease park in northern New York recently, Mike, the manager, told him, ‘You know they are putting cat litter boxes in schools now?’ When Mike said that, the Founder was standing in a ditch next to Mike’s helper, Bob. The three of them were digging up some ground to …
When the Dirtlease COO was abducted by aliens last week, he felt cool air and saw a shadow overhead. Thinking that the vehicle behind him wanted to pass, he rolled down his window, stuck out his hand and beckoned. If it was the cops, he hoped that they would not see the can of Shiner …
. Last week, I went up to the park to see the eclipse. I avoided the viewing event put on by the town in the local park. Instead, I observed it from a hunting platform a resident has set up on the undeveloped land behind the park. On the way up to the back lot, …
Motion picture, video game, music, merch and sneaker endorsement rights are still available for the story below. Interested parties should contact the Dirt Lease staff by DM. All offers will be entertained in the strictest confidence. Chat GPT: Write a Story About a Wall Street Trader Who Inherits a Mobile Home Park Once upon a …
The Dirt Lease staff recently conducted a team-building retreat in New Mexico. When the doors to the rental car shuttle in Albuquerque airport closed and the chirpy voice intoned, ‘Welcome to New Mexico – Land of Enchantment!’, a wizened airport worker seated across from the staff said, ‘Land of Entrapment.’ Here is what we have …
The Irish seem more interested in stories about manufactured housing communities than anyone else. I suspect that that is because they connect with the themes of substance abuse, rural poverty and rural despair. God bless them. So what if they say, ‘to here’, when you ask them where their round-trip ticket is to, or if …
The first time I wrote about Arch Stanton, I looked up the movie The Good, The Bad and the Ugly on Netflix and watched it. I do not recommend doing so. It is not a good film. It is not even the kind of shitty film that is fun to watch. Maybe we just have …
Near the end of his life, the American poet Theodore Roethke went to visit the Irish poet Richard Murphy on the island of Inishbofin, off the west coast of Ireland. After several weeks of increasingly erratic behavior (Roethke suffered from what we now call bipolar disorder), he became violent and was carted off to an …
A few months ago, Mike, the manager at my park in northern New York called me and said, ‘I’m hurt.’ I pushed a blonde out of my lap and said, ‘What happened?’ ‘I was threading the pins on the bucket to Old Bessie and it slipped.’ Old Bessie is what he calls the backhoe. ‘Pin’ …