Spoke

All We Need Of Hell (1994)

Jeremy Rogers

SPOKE nearly killed me.

In 1995, I was attending school in Gainesville, Florida. On a whim, I decided to pack up and visit my girlfriend, who lived in St. Augustine, for the weekend. It was a bright, cloudless afternoon as I sped through the trailer park wasteland that is Central Florida, glad that I had skipped my final class of the day. I had made the trip countless times in the past few years, so I traversed the roadways without thought. Instinctively, I knew that I was near the lovely little town of Palatka, as I had begun to literally feel the reek of the local paper mill seep into my car. I had just put SPOKE's final CD "All We Need Of Hell" into my Discman and was playing some seriously frantic air-drums to my favorite song, Ruptured Seam. As I made the turn onto Nine Mile Swamp Road, hence named for going right through, you guessed it, a swamp that's nine miles long, I fell asleep.

Let's recap, shall we? I'm a healthy, 20 year old young man, it's four o'clock in the afternoon, I'm listening to really loud music, driving on roads I've driven hundreds of times. I've never passed out, I get more than six hours of sleep a night, and don't drink. Confused? So was I when I awoke to realize that I was steering my car off the road and into the above mentioned swamp. I had the gas pedal floored as I careened into the vile bog, sending water in through every orifice of the vehicle, soaking everything, including me.

Luckily, In my state of slumber, I steered off the right side of the road, out of the way of oncoming traffic and into a relatively tree-less patch of swamp. I was shaken, but fine. My car, however, was never the same. A couple of hours and a couple of hundred dollars later, my car was towed and I was in St. Augustine with my now frenzied girlfriend. We talked about the incident for hours, wondering what had happened, when it hit me. The song after Ruptured Seam is called Can't Think, Can't Sleep and ends with the lines "Say Goodnight/Kiss that line/Here comes the night/Let's sleep now." Spooky.

I blame SPOKE for nothing. I actually got a better car out of the deal. I just don't listen to this CD while driving. And neither should you.