what's your 10-20?

breaker, breaker, you copy?
before blogworld there was another universe where the youth of yesteryear could go to congregate and make contact with strangers

it was cb-land
cb-land was peopled by:

truckies








sleazebags











spotty skateboarders












and psycho-freaks











perhaps some of these categories were not mutually exclusive.

one of the catalysts for cb fever was smokey and the bandit. i just have to show you a picture here. this was the best movie. oh we laughed. oh we cheered.











which one is better? in the second one, bo "bandit" darville is doing a peace sign. i'm torn.

this movie was the bomb for kids of my age. it was funny, it was fast and it was fuck-you to authority. the other thing that got it all going was the convoy song, which was the coolest song in those days. all the kids knew all the words, and it was on the radio constantly.

my cousins jack and michael were into cbs and had their own rig. mike was also into skateboards. mike and I are the same age, and coincidentally I was also into skateboarding, having arrived at this interest via another route [see globe boys, 27/7/05].

jack was a couple of years older, he was into cars. and not in the way that most 14-year-olds are into cars; like when they hyperventilate over a spoiler or talk about them endlessly or look at them in magazines. jack didn’t talk much, but he was lucky his dad had a fleet of vintage cars in their huge garage down on the peninsula. so jack grew up tinkering with and tootling in a rolls royce, a bentley, an mg, a napier and a jaguar. jack was a legend in his own time – he once drove my old volkswagen beetle up oliver’s hill from frankston, where the clutch had gone, to their place in mt eliza. with no clutch. he is a man of few words and the only compliment i ever remember receiving from him was that i was the only chick who could drink him under the table. i think it was a compliment.

there are many cousin stories – the petrol bomb in the tunnel underneath the road that crosses from mornington highway to mt eliza; riding a bicyle along the scratchy bottom of their swimming pool, the mad neighbour who got an axe in his head as they played games running past while an adult was chopping wood, my auntie who had a cartoon poster hanging in her kitchen, of a witch-like woman, and underneath was written “FUCK HOUSEWORK” in an olde english-style font. my uncle who seemed a permanent resident on a stool around the corner of the kitchen bench, who sat there drinking his rum, not participating in the maelstrom of children and dogs around him, other to occasionally yell at one of his sons “ it’s fuckinG! Not fuckin’ FUCKING."

he really didn't like it if you dropped the 'g'. he was very scary.

my dad tells a story of uncle james retiring to bed after christmas lunch with a magnum of champagne.

but i digress.

my cb handle was de lotus, which i now know is some bizarre hybrid of a motor vehicle that i obviously concocted. i learnt the lingo, i memorised all the letters – alpha, bravo, charlie etc. i would spend hours on the thing, adjusting the squelch, freaking out when a man’s voice came on, prefering to chat to high-voiced pre-teen boys. i think they were boys.

at this time, wherever we drove in our green holden station wagon, when we saw a truck we would put our arms out the window and do the ‘pull the horn’ thing. it was so sadly exciting when the truck would sound their big belch. i wore Crystal Cylinder surf/skate wear, these really cool thongs called slats [that had a base of straw and the thong bit was covered in velvet] and liked to eat sunny boys. in those days kids wore white zinc on their faces in summer and everyone had board shorts. i was into the beach boys, even though this was the ’70s. Man.

i realise that my addictive personality has embraced blogging much as it did cbing. cb was a brief affair. i wonder about blogging. i am busy, i have a real life. but still, still, i dally and i day dream about posts, i make notes and i keep a file of ideas. tell me this is normal. come on, i have bared my soul. now you know i liked the beach boys and thought a de lotus was a real car.

be kind.