The Mind Sirens must be those far off sounds in the psyche that take you away from here and now, where you are and never want to stay.  Like a little boy watching test rockets roaring out of earshot as you stand in your back yard in Huntsville, Alabama, full of churches that are full of music and fear of Jesus, melodious threats of damnation and salvation (if you sang loud enough) and where the air smells like jet fuel and there are strange sounds in the sky at night as men and women struggle to build machines to leave this planet.  And you still hear them as you float through the south in a van, reading a used paperback on the road between the Great Southern Oases, the college towns, Oxford, Gainesville, Baton Rouge, Athens, Jacksonville, Atlanta, Montgomery, Richmond, and the little bars and joints and student unions and Kiwanis clubs, and Grange Halls filled with eager earnest folks who think they hear it too, who come together to listen for it in the night with you, who show you where to plug in, and give you drink tickets, let you sleep on their floor, and then, at night, over and over again, shivering in the winter or sweating in the summer, you hear them in a Chapel Hill backyard party, as you retrieve your Newcastle beers hidden in the bushes, and talk like a too-smart teenager to a polite and patient young woman who you can't really see, and you notice the yard is completely darked by Oak leaves that swallow the bug-swarmed streetlights, the lights which hum and burn and crackle, lost in a tangle of leaves and vines, and you touch the girl's shoulder and ask her if she can hear it too, and before she answers, you look out at the dark party and know that everyone, laughing, kissing and lost in happy secret conversation can hear them, even those lost and full of sin and lust, predators on the prowl hungry for anything, are sometimes distracted from their search, as everyone hears something almost silently calling them away, almost insisting as they tug.  - T. Colin Dodd