Tag: Onizuka

Monday’s Theme Music

Mood: metcoffeetized

Another Monday begins its stay, we can’t have it any other way. Sold in code, set in stone, Monday, Monday is how the day is known.

It’s also July 8, 2024. Over half the year gone, and what have we learned?

Today’s high is expected to be 108, about a forty degree climb from where we’re at right now. Yesterday topped off at 105 F at my homestead. So on the one hand, it reached only 105 F yesterday and the temperature began dropping, um, ‘rapidly’ at about six. It’s a relative thing, saying ‘rapidly’. I took it as a welcomed change but then saw an orange sunset painting the blinds. Hmmm, said The Neurons, we had a clear sky so why is the sunset now that color?

Particulates, of course. Wildfire smoke, of course. So the smoke cooled the air by blocking the sun with its pollution. But there’s a fire to worry about. A mixed bag, as they say.

This wildifre is known as the Salt Creek fire. One of three locally experienced fires over the past several dsay, the other two were contained and extinguished. Here’s an explaination about the situation out of the morning’s update on Salt Creek:

Fire activity naturally decreased last night when the sun went down and temperatures dropped. With this advantage, resources overnight were able to put in a mix of bulldozer and hand line constructed with tools along the entire northern portion, as well as the southwest border of the fire. The eastern and southeastern portion remain largely unlined and will be the focus of Monday’s day shift. Today, 321 personnel are assigned to the fire, including 12 20-person crews, nine engines, 10 water tenders, seven bulldozers, and six tree fallers. Snags, or hazard trees, are present throughout the fire and may fall unexpectedly. This, along with steep terrain and hot conditions are hazards for firefighters on the line today. Aircraft will be heavily used again today as soon as possible, including one Type 3, two Type 2 and three Type 1 helicopters that are exclusively assigned to this incident. Air tankers will be ordered again as needed.

The Salt Creek Fire was first reported Sunday afternoon just after 4 p.m. Both ODF Southwest Oregon District and Lake Creek Fire District initially responded. When firefighters arrived on scene, it was estimated to be 2-5 acres and growing quickly in the hot, dry and windy conditions.

Thanks to the ODF and the well-established system for fighting these fires, and the brave individuals doing it on our behalf.

The Neurons have “Man In A Box” by Alice in Chains from 1991 in the morning mental music stream (Trademark ashy). The song received a lot of play time on the stations which I listened to back then. I was back in the USA and living in the Mountain View/Sunnyvale area on the Peninsula between San Jose and San Francisco, CA. I remained in the military then, my final tour, doing space ops in the blue cube at Onizuka Air Station.

The song came to me last night. The temperature was still warm and I awoke drenched in sweat. The words, sweat box, spun up. Hence, the song.

Stay positive, be strong, and Vote Blue in 2024. Coffee and I have negotiated a settlement and I’m now sipping away. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Sunrise was at 7:15 AM on this mildly winter Tuesday. Sunset will come at 5:36 PM in Ashland, Oregon. The temperature has already climbed to 37 degrees F and a high of 55 is anticipated.

Today is February 9, 2021. COVID-19 cases continue to drop in our county. Yesterday, we had only eight. Deaths are scaling back, too, with no new ones reported yesterday. Jackson Country remains in the extreme category, though. People walking along the streets often don’t have masks outside of downtown. Everyone in a store is masked. I haven’t been to a restaurant or other business, so I can’t address them. Vaccinations for those eighty and over begin this week.

I was thinking of 1991 this morning, collateral product to dream reflecting. February of that year, I arrived in my new duty station at Onizuka Air Station in Sunnyvale. I didn’t know that it would be my last duty assignment, that I would decide to retire after a few years. I’d been part of a spy unit in Germany in my previous tour; when the Berlin Wall came down, the mission went away, and the unit was decommissioned. I volunteered to go to the Gulf for that buildup but was denied. I instead rotated back to the states.

Hitting the Bay Area and the United States were new experiences, again. I don’t recall specific music when I arrived in the Bay Area. I remember that it was pouring rain, an end to a drought. Onizuka was a few acres dominated by the Blue Cube in the middle of sprawling aerospace company facilities. I’d gone from working with C-130s to working with satellites. In Onizuka, there was no flight line, a first for my military career; all the platforms I worked with were thousands of miles away in space. There would be no more daily roar of aircraft taking off.

Anyway, I looked up some songs from 1991 as I thought about it. “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak jumped out at me. No special reason; it’s just a reflective song for a reflective moment.

Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask, get vaccinated, and look forward. Other times are coming. The one constant is change.

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Friday’s Theme Music

Candlebox’s 1993 tune, “Far Away”, is with me today. I’m in a reflective mood, so the song fits. It’s all about the growing distance between friends.

The song came out in 1993. I was in the military then, stationed at Onizuka Air Base, Sunnyvale, California, right off of highway 101. I worked in a building called the Blue Cube. I’ve been thinking about all the people I worked with there. I’m friends with some on Facebook, and we keep up with one another. Others have veered far right politically, so we’ve distanced ourselves from each other. A few have died. Others have fallen off the map. None, that I know, live in the same place, i.e., Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, etc. All have left that area.

Life is poignant with change, isn’t it? Let me sip my coffee, look out the window (the smoke is back; air quality has been hazardous for the last three days), and speculate.

Cheers

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Memories come like tides, in private cycles. In today, I cycled back to Feb, 1991. I’d just come back from an assignment with the USAF in Germany. Enroute to California, I passed through WV and Pennsylvania on leave, visiting family, and then arrived at SF, CA.

Rain was pouring in the Bay Area that day. Ted, my sponsor, picked me up at the airport. California had been in a drought, he said, hard to believe since the great deluge was making Highway 101’s traffic a slow-moving shit show.

A little later, I was in the military hotel at Moffett just outside of Mountain View. Up the road was my new assignment, a place called Sunnyvale Air Station, a.k.a., the Blue Cube. The name was changed to Onizuka Air Base to honor Ellison Onizuka, an astronaut killed in the Challenger disaster.

Onizuka turned out to be a good assignment and my last. I retired there four and a half years later. The base closed down in 2010 and the Blue Cube was demolished in 2014. I blamed myself because the base probably wasn’t the same after my tenure (ha, ha).

It was a complete unknown to me when I arrived, though. Bored and tired, I flipped through channels in my hotel room, rediscovering American pop culture after four years in Germany, and saw a video by R.E.M. called “Losing My Religion”.

Somehow, it fit the moment.

 

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

This song, “One Night Love Affair,” has been streaming off and on in my head throughout the last several days. Although it was released and became a hit in 1984 when I was stationed on Okinawa, I associate the song with Onizuka Air Station in Sunnyvale, California.

I was in charge of the base command post at Onizuka. We were living in base housing on Moffett NAS in Mountain View. Several of the people who worked for me were neighbors. We used to throw huge parties, playing music and volleyball, singing, dancing, grilling out and drinking for a day.

I made mixed tapes for these affairs. One of the tapes included several Bryan Adams songs, including “One Night Love Affair”. This song, in particular, would always start an argument. It followed a Boston song, “Foreplay/Long Time”. One guy loved Boston. He thought Boston and Van Halen were the greatest rock bands ever. He despised Bryan Adams. The other liked Boston and Van Halen. While he preferred Bush and STP, he staunchly defended Bryan Adams as a rocker. Once this discussion commenced, it would continue off and on until the party ended. Sometimes they’d be the last ones there, still talking about it.

The memories make me smile.

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A Turn Into the Weird

Once again, my dreams took a hard turn into the weird. The one dominates my waking thinking.

There are six lanes of highway. I’m overlooking them with friends. One of these friends is Randy Moore. Randy and I served twenty years in the U.S.A.F. and were together at Onizuka Air Station, Sunnyvale, CA, in the early 1990s. He passed away from colon cancer the month of his sixtieth birthday.

He was alive and the Randy I knew in my dream. The six lanes of traffic have five ‘support lanes’. That’s the only way I can explain it. It’s a fast highway. But, while studying it, Randy and I (and others) realize there’s a huge gap in the road. Basically, it ends in a black chasm.

Then we realize we’re in an enormous cave. Then, we find, oh, wait, the highway continues on the other side of this chasm. The catch is, that’s several hundred yards away. That’s a helluva catch.

So we’re chatting, what a weird design, is it by design, what else could have caused this, and end by saying, “We should stop cars coming down because they can’t make it.” But we were also noting, “They see it. They’re stopping.”

But the driver of an old van guns his engine. Tires screaming, smoke billows out and the vehicle launches down the road into the dark sky. “He’s trying for it,” either Randy or I say.

“He’s not going to make it,” one of us say.

“Oh, wait…maybe it will.”

The van flies through the air like a scene from ‘The A-Team’. We watch.

“He’s not going to make it,” I declare. As I make the statement, a red Ferrari screams past.

“What the hell is he doing?” Randy asks.

I’m amused and appalled. “He’s trying to save the van.”

The Ferrari catches the van as both land on the other side. They bounce and skew sideways before slamming into the cavern wall in a ball of flame.

Randy and I begin wandering the cavern lanes. Examining the structure, we wonder, how will we ever get to the other side.

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Today’s Theme Music

This song, from 1985, was a friend’s favorite. He was part of our military ‘circle of singers’, so it was incorporated in the closing part of our parties.

We were stationed at Onizuka Air Station in Sunnyvale, California. We were the people inside the Blue Cube, helping to watch and guard space. I was the Command Post Superintendent during my first few years and lived on Moffett Base Housing (close to Hanger One) not far from many others of my unit. We loved throwing summer parties to celebrate holidays and special events. They included volleyball games and grew big and popular, including people form outside my org.

We tended to end the parties with the circle sing of core members. We were just in a circle belting out a song at the top of our lungs as the stereo blasted away.

For one memorial Labor Day celebration, all the neighbors had attended, eaten, played and partied, so noise wasn’t a problem…in the immediate area. But the party became quite loud, affecting people a few streets over. They called the security police to complain, and those esteemed officers came to our door. Fortunately, the commander of the SP squadron, along with the acting base commander, were in attendance at our party, participating in our circle of song. We turned the music down and behaved ourselves and all were happy.

We had great times in those days.

Here’s Tears for Fear with ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’. 

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