"Pirates are evil?

The Marines are righteous?

These terms have always changed throughout the course of history!

Children who have never seen peace, and children who have never seen war, have different values!

Those who stand at the top determine what's wrong and what's right! This very place is neutral ground!

Justice will prevail you say? But of course it will!

Whoever wins this war becomes justice"

- Don Flamingo, Shichibukai

Went out for dinner and drinks afterwards with my cousins. Discovered a whole new undiscovered world behind the TCC opposite the road from Somerset MRT.

Oriental style bars, live bands, all inhabiting the Peranakan-style shophouses of yesteryear.

Had a Belvedere Cytrus with Ginger and lime. Not too bad.

Between the Pedestals of Night and Morning
Between red death and radiant desire
With not one sound of triumph or of warning
Stands the great sentry on the Bridge of Fire
O transient soul, thy thought with dreams adorning
Cast down the laurel, and unstring the lyre:
the wheels of Time are turning, turning, turning,
The slow stream channels deep and doth not tire
Gods on their bridge above
Whispering lies and love
Shall mock your passage down the sunless river
Which, rolling all it streams,
shall take you, king of dreams
-unthroned and unapproachable for ever -
to where the kings who dreamed of old
Whiten in habitations monumental cold

James Elroy Flecker, 1884 - 1915

Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,
And layes the soul to sleepe in quiet grave?
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.

-Book I, canto 9, stanza 40, The Faerie Queen (1589 - 1596), Edmund Spenser

Death is before me today:
like the recovery of a sick man,
like going forth into a garden after sickness.

Death is before me today:
like the odor of myrrh,
like sitting under a sail in a good wind.

Death is before me today:
like the course of a stream;
like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.

Death is before me today:
like the home that a man longs to see,
after years spent as a captive.

--From "Dialogue of a Misanthrope with His Soul" (ca 2000 BC), now called "Dispute between a man and his Ba," from a papyrus of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt. Cited in The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology (1962), p. 138, by Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), who slightly changed the original quotation in Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912) p. 195, by James Henry Breasted (1865-1935). Breasted himself had translated a German translation of the papyrus by Adolf Erman (1854-1937) in 1896, Gespräch eines Lebensmüden mit seiner Seele (Conversation of a life-weary person with his soul), in the Abhandl. der königl. Preuss. Akad. (Papers of the Royal Prussian Academy) Berlin, 1896. Originally from Lepsius' book Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethopien (Monuments from Egypt and Ethiopia), VI, Taf., 111-112.

A papyrus of the Middle Kingdom in Berlin (P. 3024), first published by Karl Richard Lepsius (1810-1884) in 1859; Lepsius had bought the papyrus in Egypt in 1843. It is now in the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection of the Berlin Museum, no. 3024.

It is one of the oldest documents in the world to speak of a state of mind. This is only a small part of it.