LOOKING AT "I AM NINOY SHIRT" THAT WORE ME TO DIVISORIA (ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL PLACE) TRYING TO EXCRETE PRODUCTIVE JUICES FROM MY PULP MIND
By: Iris P. Concepcion

The introduction is so long that it can form a sexy body, feet, legs, toes, warts, neck, cuticles to say, an entity with only a face.

Veering off from the heat, I found a safety net in a truly weird environment : Divisoria. All throughout my stay in Manila (from the prime age of 16 to Madonna's chameleon range) I have not truly explored this place for its reputation (smelly, heat, snatchers). I only went there once: to buy mementos for a friend who is going to get married.

I love the retention of the the old concrete materials in a bookstore and a bank. Their walls looked like chipped blocks from the once bombed-out Manila during the Japanese Occupation.

I did not enter its airconditioned malls: off to the heat areas I went. Their prices are low and I liked the haggling part where you can't actually haggle because the owner, in halting Tagalog, says that I must find a stall that offers a lower price and if I do, he will double his discount or give me a rebate (something to that effect). These are kind of messy (in a topsyturvy way) edifices where it is so hot you need visors not to protect your eyes but the air that waves in front of your eyes.

Quiapo is another area where the pulse and beat of the metropolis is especially felt. There is something biblical about its array of people selling wares from death to redemption; one is almost surprised to see surfboards nestled beside rosary beads.

You feel almost free to dive into swerves without having to thwart loudmouths you often hear babbling in huge establishments: theirs is a different kind of yell; their language extracted from the bowels of the earth sounding off in the bells of its famous church. I attended a mass here and there is certainly freedom of speech reverberating in its well-sculpted interior contours. Sometimes, I need to do away with the normal information plugs and listen to gut talks from Godly sources. I was admonished to turn off my cellphone; I took a pic and was reminded all over to follow the instruction. This is what fathers do usually. My millions of ascendants have a common factor: stern but firm to make me toe the line.

I never stray because of this.

Wisdom comes from this kind of silence and communion, allowing me to decide promptly as encapsuled in the next paragraph:

I felt inner liberation in saying "no" to people who are only after my spleen and guts and nothing else (perhaps, I have a price tag to them--what a silly proposition for friendship). I dropped those too. No, I do not see made-up gorgeous faces as the most fastidious way to earn social points (overrated). I have been with the truly blessed ones in spirit and I have discovered their beautiful souls on MY terms. I am kind of happy communicating with these people. You kind of see beneath the sudden flux of "you are ours" by the larger context of set-ups in their own brand of networking: I have seen mine in kalyes, roads, vehicles. Sometimes they are perched atop the roof fixing leaks.

I failed to throw away my old compact discs with droppable songs in it: I hope the singers learned something inside my world. When they put mud and urinated on the floor for me to mop, just brazenly put things on the DVD as assaults to my own private idaho (I allowed them; then I talked them out of it) I did so as an affront to their boorishness with nary a smack. When they took the bait to still instill their warped sense of reasoning via plasticity, I still fed them. That is no fluke, to say the least, and for all eternity, I have interacted with some drab people, but most often, the exciting ones who had ruminated in wondrous forms the value of conversations as inputs to major social decisions.

I once cooked for a group and came this little woman who had to voice out what I needed to hear in that entire praying-before-meals ritual. The words: "Thank you God; thank you Iris, for preparing ALL this." I saw another blase woman smirk at the words uttered but there's a fan standing at the end of my dining table, speaking without strings attached. Those are my own personal perks.

I couldn't thank enough the son who wrote as what his mother might have wished him to write: writing from the platform of truth: he soared beyond his airplane.

Yes, those are the people I GENUINELY love. And yes, they find the things I also find beautiful in Divisoria. And Quiapo.