At Dada's place

I have just come from Dada’s place, a cozy, dim-lighted hangout at the ground floor of the Ormoc superdome right beside the more famous Manina’s, scene of an unsolved murder that has stirred up emotions months ago. The place is almost unseen since Manina’s tends to be more visible.

But inside Dada’s, one feels safer from the maddening crowd, “away from it all,” I should say. Here you can converse to your heart’s content, with a fitting background music to boot (a few acoustic favorites were being played this afternoon). Here you can bare your heart and soul so to speak and unload whatever it is that is bothering you.

Well, nothing was bothering me this afternoon, except that it was one of those times when I simply wanted to drink, and to hell with the conversation. Oh, Felix, my editor friend, was talking about “desperate wives” and “honesty,” and I was listening (or pretending to listen) and nodding my head in complete agreement to whatever he was blabbering about. I knew he wanted an audience, a sounding board. So here I was in that familiar role, enjoying my bottles of San Mig between bites of our delicious pulutan.

You may be right there, I told him. Our city has its own share of “desperate” housewives who want to find meaning, fulfillment and happiness in their lives. Their husbands are either philandering or flirting with younger, sexier girls and they - those desperate housewives – think that it is perfectly alright – and even morally justifiable – to find their happiness outside their marital bed.

If people were perfectly honest (and that includes these desperate housewives), then a lot of people would be miserable. That is his thesis in his next editorial, he said. Well, good luck, I said. But he’d better not expect any reaction, I was about to tell him. Reaction or interaction is the last thing you’d expect from readers of the paper that Felix is editing. They’ll read but they’ll keep their reactions to themselves. Why bother to write the editor in the first place? Letters to the editor don’t solve problems. They’d only make things more complicated. So, indeed, why bother?

All in one karaoke player

At Dada’s, you also get to observe a lot of people who find the place a good transition point, where you can rest for a while, drink a little, engage in meaningless prattle and go back to your humdrum day-to-day existence afterwards. There was this large group of schoolmates who played basketball together in high school. Apparently, they have not gotten tired of each other’s faces and each other jokes for they were laughing at stories about things that happened 30 years earlier. Only this time they had their wives and children in tow who, unfortunately, could not laugh with their balding fathers. Would you laugh at your old teacher who confused his p and f and who kept mispronouncing his e’s and i’s?

At a nearby table, we kept overhearing a bespectacled young girl lecturing to two male companions about love and that kind of stuff, acting like she was her friends’ love guru. Oh, you can’t help but eavesdrop sometimes. It sure is comforting to know that often your neighbors talk more sense than you do. But what the heck, San Mig is still the more potent decoction. Let us drink and be merry!