Our story begins on a clear winters evening in a small Swedish town. A pretty boring uneventful tour of the skips/dumpsters end with the amazing find of a bin full to overflowing with freshly butchered deer and moose carcasses (see photo)!!!! Obviously useless but also quite random and amusing to see (see photo). Also did get a nice couple of moose hide for making into leather later.

The story continues a couple of weeks later in cold harsh Helsinki. Snow is deep on the ground and the cities residents are cuddled up in their houses. A group of us have itchy feet and decide to go for a walk. To explore a little. Close to the end of our walk we come across a huge dumpster outside a house full to the brim with stuff. It appears like everything from the house has been dumped into this dumpster. The 5 of us climb in and start rummaging around and throwing out any goodies we find… quickly piles are growing around the outside of the bin. A passing car has trouble getting through! After a while another dumpster friend sniffing some goodies joins us in our exploring. Finds include wool blankets and other bedding. Tinned fruit. Chocolate bars. A nice leather bag. Old womens clothes. And many other house trinkets. Many electrical goods which we left behind. The most confusing find to a couple of our gang is a sealed wooden box which rattles when shaken. I recommend smashing it on the side of the skip yet they are committed to taking it home with us. A short while later we return to the warmth of house and attention quickly turns to aforementioned box. We start to open it and it comes to our attention that this may actually be a person that we have brought home. What The Fuck? Disbelief continues and after sprinkling some of granny’s bone fragments into the sink the truth is confirmed. Is this the most stupid dumpster find Helsinki has ever seen? A dead burnt person in a box? So after much laughing and jokes and a super active facebook post. And after granny (unconfirmed) had sat in the rocking chair for a night and day we decided to eventually show her the respect that she wasn’t going to get in a landfill site and had a ceremony scattering her ashes to the wind and burying some in the snow. This whole event was quite fitting and felt more-so powerful as we were in Finland partly to commemorate the life of a friend who had recently committed suicide.

To conclude we returned to the house somber and satisfied and I decided to look through my findings from the granny dumpster. I looked in a zip pocket on the leather bag and found 130 euros in their!!!! Turns out we dumpstered Granny and her life savings!!!

The end – Bring on 2011

Love,

The Sentient Carrot (thesentientcarrot.wordpress.com) and other reprobates. x x