Wednesday, September 07, 2005

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.

13 comments:

DJ said...

Ah yes but did you have eyeballs? Did someone nearby Splatter you?
Did you have an "Aussie" 18 channel rig or an American 40 channel one? Sideband or AM only? Extras? A powermike? A linear? Did you SWEAR* your antenna in?
Did you actually bother to get a license for your rig? Did you have a TVI Filter? Did anyone threaten to put drawing pins into your coax cable?

Oh yes those halcyon days of CBing, you could act like a goose, pseduo anonymously and for the most part get away with it. Some people took it all wayyyyyy too seriously trying to impose some kind of law of the channels upon everyone else.
Then there were the ones that seemingly lived on or by the radios, they were there all the time.

At one point we lived in Pakenham and there was a lady who called herself "Bellbird Base" - She used to talk to all the truckers on the Princes Hwy and keep a ear to the ground for all the "Double Bubbles" and let the truckers know where they all were.

Good times.


*SWEAR, yes I know its S.W.R. but everyone used to mangle it and say SWEAR

PiesFan90 said...

Convoy song immortalized on the Simpsons in that episode when Homer gets hooked on a CB, and a truck.

DJ said...

Oh BTW turn on Word Verification under Settings to stop blog spam like the one you got

Melba said...

thanks DJ but i don't want to word verification. it's annoying for people who visit. i'll just delete the spam.

ps yes i did have one eyeball. ended up buying an electric amp and guitar from a guy called peter who told me he bought the guitar from his friend pat cash, a tennis player who i would be hearing about in the future. sure, i thought. the rest of your questions are too tech for me, or i can't remember. can't even remember how many channels the thing had.

clokey, do you have any real life experience to offer other than being able to quote from every single simpsons episode in existence?????

love you clokes xxx

Aleks - Anarcho-Syndicalist said...

Actually Clokeeeey, the Convoy song was immortalised in the Simpsons episode "Radio Bart". On the ad for the Superstar Celebrity Microphone, a microphone that acts as a mini radio transmitter, one of the people sing the convoy song. When Homer buys the microphone for Bart, Homer later demonstrates it to Bart by also singing the convoy song. This was the episode where Bart used the microphone to pretend he was Timmy O'Toole and that he had fallen down a well.

Collingwood fans. Actually AFL fans full stop.

Melba said...

um, roger that locket, was that extra sensitive bap perception?
over

PiesFan90 said...

Aleks, I bow to your greater simpsons knowledge, but a CB did make an appearance in that episode with the automatic truck driving doo-hicky.

Justine said...

I would be so scared if someone correct my enunciation like that.
Is that where you learnt not to write 'youse'?
:-)

Melba said...

hi justine, my uncle was a very very scary man. i remember once when he was pissed... um, no, put it this way, i remember once... he grabbed me to dance to moon river, you know really close and tight. it wasn't oogy cause he wasn't like that, but it was intimidating and embarrassing and my cousins and their cool friends just laughed...

about the youse i'm sorry if i offended you. i thought you might have been jokingly using it. i just don't use it. it's just a family thing. and yes i come from the sort of family where you weren't to drop your g's even when you were swearing.

ciao ciao bella

OvaGirl said...

Hey melbourne Girl, there was an all too brief snippet in my teen life when I CBed! My best friend was going out with a guy who had a car (!) and a CB. She had a very sexy deep voice (at the age of 15) and called herself "Cinderella" and used to say that she was a "lonely YL wanting to talk to a YM". I thought it was incredibly cool and exotic to talk to strangers. (Sad really)Cinderella was doing her spiel one day and a voice called back that she sounded more like "a moll with a hole". Cinders was not happy. Anyway, it all ended after a few months when she broke up with Car Boy....just had a flashback that we used to say first off...CQ CQ Anybody got a copy... (at least I think we did...maybe it was CP3O...)

Melba said...

hi ova girl

no it WAS CQ CQ, and the moment when through the empty silence, a voice would respond. and the YL talk, about looking for a YM. yes it was all true.

seriously good times as dj said. but i think blogging is better. it's "far more expressive"

Melba said...

it was a very funny joke
thanks for being gracious re swans

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