In 2021 I left time. My mind was in Einsteinian history 1879-1923, in Scottish-Canadian history of the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s, and my body was at the farm that was, for me as a kid, the happiest place on earth. I found my aunt dead beside her bed at the farm in early 2021, either half way through getting dressed for the day or undressed for the night. The paramedics wrote some word on the death certificate which meant, they explained to me, could-a-bin a heart thing, could-a-bin a stroke thing (and in their minds: don’t say vax!).

That was the impetus to the year I spent readying the farm for sale and excavating the history of my grandmother and great-aunt, who, for me as a kid, were the happiest people to be with on earth. The previous September, after I became unemployed again, and moved my apartment into a storage space again, and started drinking again, I discovered that https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/ had published the first few decades of Einstein’s life in the form of all available primary source material (papers, lectures, articles and many, many letters) and also that Einstein was born exactly 100 years before me: 1879. In an act of self-flagellation, I decided to read every document beginning with his birth certificate word for word, and including all that math I didn’t understand, to explore the nature of a life that, unlike mine, did not accumulate into moving one’s apartment into a storage space…again. Secondarily, I made a case study of Einstein’s life, work and philosophy for the sake of my philosophical essay, and 2021 became the year I finished the first version: The Pressure of Light.

Those tumultuous but deep thinking days sorting through large piles of paper, letters, scrap books, old tech, photos, farm equipment, books, scrap wood and just so much stuff were saturated in alcohol, weed and colt cigars. I remember some particularly drunken days when I wandered the rolling-cow-fields and old-growth hard-wood forests, which inspired the name Highland Park Farm, with a taste in my mouth of liqueurs that had sat in the farm’s liquor cabinet for fifty years or more.

This video is the last I took in 2021 (in future posts I’ll share videos of the excavation and estate sales). The cats in the picture are Misty and Norfleet, who, along with my grandmother and great aunt’s two horses and two donkeys, were, for me as a kid, the happiest animals to be with on earth.