THE BUILDING

By : Iris P. Concepcion

If you are stuck in an Armageddonian traffic somewhere in the City Hall area, you must pause for a while, feel the ingress/egress breathing from your nostrils, get your hankie to wipe off that one trickling, perspiration dew just below your right eyelashes, drink from your bottled mineral water (with alkaline), and while you are feeling all that heat in maddening temperature, take a cursory glance at this building.

It is a side edifice of the main architectural structure open to multi-dimensional viewing but the intersection here is eternally ripe for public aesthetic appreciation. Whenever I am aboard a jeepney filled with either a) sleeping b) mumbling c) staring d) bored e) loud people, I always focus my pair of probing irises to these commemorative words : CITY HALL, ERECTED 1969.

I figured the designer of this engraved name has an exceptional sex life as his mind Jungan-ly connects the efficacy of those two words, double entendre if you may, and used the uncanny coincidence of its foundation as hewed in his fulfilled sexuality.

This building is a product of the luxuriously exposed, in-your-face virility of all times.

As my mind streams regularly on an insightful basis, always at this intersection (its front space is barren--it invites more fruitful and playful clay/wood/steel sculptural endeavors), I often wonder if my fellow writers had gotten stuck in this parallel realization but decided to shelve the essay with this as masterpiece in favor of a newly launched cosmetic powder.

I am in this phase where I want every kid to savor the existing museums in the country, walk by its nocturnal alleys with their parents, experience the wonderful visual journeys for what is essentially under their perspiring noses all the time.

Doubly, I am likewise in this phase where I want to strangle people if they do not, say, stare briefly, at this edifice, in this monumental intersection.

As a reel (my invisible camera is still rolling), I have always fantasized that people in the jeepney where I am riding, when at a halt in this particular place, like keyed-in robots (this is thrilling and excitable), while in that area, these passengers shall simultaneously look at this building as if it is a gaggle(?) of beautiful swans.

Then the imaginary arrow of a guide will show them the details: the cemented drapery (see windows), the fantastic line of cars in their precise parking colors, and that signage of course.

Don't you just dream this to be your house?

Sample:

M: "Where do you live?"

N: "City Hall, Erected 1969"

I could not think of any other functional banter than that.