Giddy up!!
Shits on fire.
Happy Lunar New Year. The Year of the Fire Horse.
Get ready.
Hanoi went quiet. Ohhh so quiet.
The locals who moved here for opportunity packed up and returned to their home provinces. In the lead up to what is called TéT, the Vietnamese New Year, you hear the warnings. Stock up. Buy essentials. Nothing will be open. No one will be around. The city shuts down.
Yes and no.
The sky did not fall. But it was eerily still.
I made this recording from my window. I thought I had a few birds that hung out nearby. Turns out there is a whole flock living in the trees across the street.
Normally the street below sounds like a live action video game. At 8:30 in the morning it is like playing Frogger trying to cross. This week it felt like someone muted the entire city.
For a moment, Hanoi felt like a small town again. You could hear your own thoughts.
As the days got closer to TéT I stocked up on food, just in case. Then I had a thought. If I was going to fast for the Western New Year, why not fast for the local one too.
So I did.
Ninety hours.
I had planned on going 110. Somewhere around hour eighty five my body staged a protest. Zero energy. Aches. A strange heaviness. This one went deeper than January.
In January the fast felt surface level, clean, almost pleasant. This time I could feel my body switching gears. Ketosis lighting up. Heat rising. For three and a half days I felt like my friends who are navigating menopause. I was flushed. Ready to put on daisy dukes, a bikini top, and make a snow angel.
I could almost imagine the autophagy happening. Cells cleaning house. I was my own junior high science experiment.
The quiet outside matched the internal reset.
By Saturday afternoon the neighborhood began to stir. A motorbike here. A door slamming there. Then full volume again.
Beep beep em OI!!!
In between all that I walked the lake while it was still empty. Worked on my Japanese AI short film. Cleaned house internally and externally. Booked flights to Cambodia and Thailand. Finalized plans for the symposium at BACC at the end of March.
The year is already stretching its legs.
I also finally used up the last of my V60 filters. Random. Huh?
In December, when my friends visited we went to a tea tasting. That was the turning point. Before that I was a committed coffee guy. Two to four pourovers a day from the outstanding roaster up the road.
I had this idea to keep every used filter and do something with them. I do not know why. The colors, the design of the coffee stain is fascinating to me. Some ideas just tap you on the shoulder and refuse to leave.
During TéT week I used the last one. One hundred nineteen filters in total. I photographed each of them.
Here is a quick screen recording from my photo library.
I am not sure what to do with the physical filters. Hanoi humidity is not kind to paper. It adds character, they say. They say a lot of things.
Maybe I convince a coffee shop or small gallery to hang all one hundred nineteen on a wall. A caffeine timeline. A ritual archive. I will keep you posted.
For the digital copies, I am building a small site that will release one per day. Slow drip. When it is ready, you will get the link first.
What else besides the world unraveling at the seams?!?!?!?!?!?!
There are a few interesting paths opening up right now. I am not ready to talk about them yet. Once I lace up my boots and take the first steps, you will hear about it.
Keeping it short this week.
Hope you are awesome.
I almost forgot. When I was looking for images to upload here, I was reminded that on New Year’s Day I gave myself another hand poke tattoo. This is the symbol for transform.
LOVE & LIGHT
MISTER MOYER