October 31st 2025, San Francisco

I wanted to remind myself of who I am, where I’ve been and how I came to be. And so I decided to read through my journals starting 2023, specifically November 2023. I called it The Great Breakdown then but I know now that there were greater “breakdowns” to come ahead for me. I now know better to just call it the unravelling or even the withering of a flower that is past its bloom if only to make room for another season of fresh blossoms.

Do you remember the show The Crystal Maze? The British show from the 90s with the bald guy? Well, that’s how journals from 2023 felt like. Like a woman who has done her best and given it her all and is rushing towards the crystal in the maze, panicking to complete whatever whack-a-mole challenges that sprung up in her path before times up, while also ardently wishing for some magic escape from this labyrinth of time and space. 

I was 38, living in a brick-walled Chelsea apartment, walking to work on The High Line to a job close enough to my dream, single, never married, no kids, dating loops of men and arriving at the same spot again and again. It was also the dawn of many realizations—futility of my misplaced ambitions at work, absurdity of a lawyer suggesting it would take me 55 years to get an American Green Card despite working in the country non-stop since 2010, gradual shutdown of systems starting with my body and secretly dreading which system would fail me next. 

I could feel the walls closing in and all I could think of was escaping. A recurring image that has comforted me since I was a ten was now a permanent fixture in the ruins of my mind: looking out from the point of view of a shepherd sitting on their haunches on a mountain cliff in silence with their grazing sheep. 

My intention over the next few days is to post journal entries from the last couple of years or to post net new ones in an attempt to find a singular thread across all these journals and thousands of words I have staring back at me, to answer the one eternal question: Veridis Quo?

Veridis Quo - Daft Punk

“Veridis quo” is a wordplay on the Latin phrase “Quo vadis?”, literally, “Whither goest thou?” or “Where are you going?”. The greater meaning of the phrase is, “To what purpose?” or, “To what end are you doing this?” http://daftpunk.wikia.com/wiki/Veridis_Quo

​​Thomas Bangalter on Veridis Quo-November 24, 2000: Veridis Quo is really weird because we can’t really remember the meaning of this track anymore at all. Veridis, there is different explanations for veridis: It could be close to veriatas which is truth, you could check in latin, but its not really that so we re still looking to see what etymological sense there is to it because veridis does not seem to have a proper match in Latin. … I dont know if we appreciate the weirdness or not. I think the state of being somewhere and realising you are in some place can be funny and can be very scary or just mystical…. I think this track is also about the loss of time and reality and space and time,. Space Continuum, A void. Like you said it was like Giorgio Moroder but it can sound like classical music but at the same time it can sound like futuristic music so its really wierd to see the future and the past like shoooo, circling. So from something that might be the music of the future, like electronic chord and harmony, but also music from centuries ago, and i think we like this idea of linking both ends. And you just get lost in the void. -the source is no longer on thump but it was https://thump.vice.com/en_uk/words/daft-punk-birth-of-robots if anyone wants to hunt the internet archives.