Omen

(Content note: discussion of animal death and of all the 2020 things, particularly the early days of COVID and the murder of George Floyd.)

It's a Monday in March 2020 and I'm ransacking my cubicle for all the things I think I might need to work from home for at least the next two weeks, since my kid's school is making a "temporary" switch to e-learning. This process is made a lot slower by the total uncertainty that has gripped everyone and everything as the gravity and complexity of what's unfolding have finally begun to sink in, and the splitting headache I'm nursing after too many glasses of wine at a friend's party the night before. (I'd stayed there much later than I should have on a work night, getting a feeling that it was going to be a long time before I would get to sit around drinking and playing cards with my friends again. I was right.) When I finally make it to the parking garage at the end of the day, weighted down with all the stuff I can't leave behind, I back out of my spot and see a tiny furry body left behind in the spot. At some point during the day, some little vole or mouse-type creature crawled under my car and died. "Okay, that's ominous," I think, and drive away for the next two years.

Two months later, Memorial Day. E-learning has been extended for the rest of the academic year, and both my husband and I have been told to expect to work from home indefinitely. I'm peeking at social media one last time before I go to bed and see a lot of chatter about somebody dying in police custody a few miles south of where I live, maybe after being choked or tased or restrained in some way. The MPD has already released a statement, but I've lived in Minneapolis long enough to take their claims with an entire shaker of salt. Facebook and Twitter don't buy their story, either. "WE HAVE VIDEO," a prominent local antiracist activist comments. I don't know what to make of any of it and resolve to look for a follow-up the next day.

The next day, things are clearer in some ways and much less clear in others. Like pretty much everyone else in the world, I saw the stark images of George Floyd's murder that made the MPD's lies blatantly obvious, and the outbursts of justified anger that followed. Small clumps of protest were already beginning to pop up. Someone on Twitter shared a video of a masked person flinging a water bottle at a passing police car near 38th and Chicago. I vividly remembered the killing of Jamar Clark a few years earlier (which took place even closer to my home) and the occupation of the Fourth Precinct that followed it, and saw history repeating itself. Whoa, I remember thinking, if it wasn't for the pandemic probably making people less likely to protest, this could really turn into something big.

One of the only images saved on my phone’s camera roll from late May-early June 2020 - artist unknown.

By the weekend I know I've underestimated everything. The massive but peaceful protest marches turn violent and destructive by night, spurred on largely by opportunists from out of town and fascists trying to advance their own evil goals. With curfews starting earlier each night and highways and bridges being shut down, my family weighs our options and decides to keep sheltering in place. We back my car into the garage and load it up with bug-out bags, put away garbage cans and patio furniture and anything that might become a projectile, soak down the yard with a garden hose to make the house less likely to catch fire if the rioting makes it this far north. We've been stretching out the time between shopping trips due to COVID exposure concerns, and we’re running out of all kinds of essentials, so I make a run to the closest grocery store that isn't preemptively boarded up, which is in an outer-ring suburb a 40-minute drive away. It's full of sunburned people wearing tank tops but not face masks, loading up on charcoal and hot dogs and beer on their way to their lake houses, as if oblivious to the siege mentality that has taken hold of my neighborhood 15 miles to the south. It might be the most surreal part of this yet, like stepping onto a planet of permanent 2019.

My husband and I decide to sleep in shifts once the kids are in bed, so someone will be awake to react to a crisis if we have to. My daughter has just turned three and doesn't really understand what's going on, so she goes to sleep as readily as ever. This is not the case for my then-eight-year-old son, who has been badly frightened by the emergency alert that had just blared out from the ancient cell phone we've given him so he could call his friends and play Minecraft with them while everyone sits in lockdown. I lay down next to him in his bed and reassure him with a confidence I absolutely do not feel that everything is going to be okay and that we will keep him safe, even as smoke wafts through the open window and a National Guard convoy rolls past our house and somebody lets off what sounds like an entire clip of an automatic rifle just down the street. Eventually he falls asleep, but I don't, not for hours. When I finally do, I have the dream that constitutes the second verse of "Omen." As soon as I wake up, I write the song.

I almost never play "Omen" live, and a part of me hesitated to put it on this record. I wrote in a previous blog post about my concern that "Sisyphus" would be misinterpreted, but I think the risk is even higher for "Omen." I suffered a lot less during COVID and the uprising than many people did, and I worry that the refrain of "nothing's gonna change" comes across as me asserting that everything is fine and nothing should change when I don't believe that at all. Yet when I think about the spring of 2020, what I remember most is how unsettled everything about my existence seemed, and how incredibly shitty it felt to be melted down and waiting in that crucible to find out what I'd be forged into. There were times that year when I honestly thought there were equal odds that we were heading for a socialist utopia of mutual care and support that would bring healing and freedom to us all, or for an authoritarian crackdown in response to chaos so severe we would all gratefully greet our new overlords as liberators. I remember wishing that I could put myself and my family into suspended animation and fast-forward us all a year or a decade or a century to see how things would turn out. Even if we all woke up into a scorched dystopia, at least we'd be free from the uncertainty.

But I'm releasing "Omen" despite my trepidation. I hope it serves as a snapshot of a particularly challenging historical moment. It was the first "post-lockdown" song I wrote. In the early days of COVID I struggled a lot to find the desire or motivation to make music. I was deeply grieving the sudden loss of in-person live performances and song circles and having a hard time adjusting to the reality that it might take years for those opportunities to come back. The virtual music events that began to pop up felt like an unwanted demand for me to spend time and energy I didn't have on something I'd never wanted to learn how to do. Writing "Omen" reminded me that I could still write songs even in difficult times and adapt my creativity to my circumstances, and cracked open a door that eventually led to me making my peace with livestreamed concerts and virtual filk circles (though I'd still always rather make music in person).

"Omen" was also one of the first tracks I recorded for Sisyphus. The lead vocal is actually a first-take scratch track that I recorded in summer 2020, mainly to test out the microphone my producer Dave had loaned me as we worked through the technical aspects of shifting to remote album production. (I recorded my vocals and acoustic guitar in my basement on my phone in GarageBand as bed tracks, and my bandmates each overdubbed on them in their own spaces. Yes, much of this record was made on an iPhone!) I had always intended to replace it with a more polished take, but as time went on, we realized that although I could certainly sing the part with greater technical skill, there was no way I would ever get a better emotive performance than I did on the demo despite the take's many imperfections. It is a particularly vulnerable moment on a record that is already full of them. I'm glad I captured it, and I don't want to go back.