Hey everybody, Flobo here! You like how I mention my name at the top of every blog as if you couldn’t tell it was me? Yeah, I do that.
This week marks another edition of “Free Sample” posts. Part wanting me to offer something different and part wanting you to get to know me as a writer, samples are pieces that I have created that have been previously published. Sure, if you wait around for the next fifteen to twenty years you wouldn’t have to buy any of my books at all, but that would be such a party foul.
This week’s entry is called “Beach Radio”, and it appeared in my first collection of short stories and poems entitled “By The Ounce And Other Tales.” Being my first published work, I do hold “By The Ounce” near and dear to that vacuum where my heart should be.
“Beach Radio” was textually (or super-textually) about my time as a radio DJ in a beach town in Florida. Done and done, super simple and case closed, right?
Well beyond that (or sub-textually) “Beach Radio” was really about simpler times before the digital integration of our lives and how people came together around the radio. Not necessarily in the “family around the oak radio cabinet in the 40s” way, but hearing new artists or radio personalities being celebrities in their own right kind of “modern nostalgia.”
This is not to say I was good enough to be a modern celebrity. Have you heard my aircheck?
Now to read my literary attempt to recreate the “The Endless Summer” poster:
Beach Radio
Off the breaking waves
The red On-Air light flashes
An ancient city united by the ear
Through the shops
Out onto the street
It is the pulse of the town
Some favor the personalities
And others the music
But everyone is satisfied
When the sky turns from blue to black
The soundtrack to the daily life
Is a secret kept by the locals
She is like no other
A unique town treasure
That cannot be photographed
–Flobo
Flobo Boyce 