The Steve Miller Band is a classic rock staple, but not a band lauded and praised like others.  They don’t draw much attention to themselves, yet they don’t offend.  When you hear one of their songs at the grocery store you don’t get excited, but you do look to the speakers in the ceiling and say, “Good tunes.”

This song popped up on Q95 while driving through BF Hancock county for my job.  That big ol’ jet airliner always takes me back to the summer of ‘99, a simpler time before shoe bombers, bailouts, and the Department of Homeland Security.  The neo-hippy movement was in its dying throes of cultural relevance ready to be replaced by the aughts’ 1980’s redux blugh. That is, except at the Deer Creek Music Center for the Steve Miller Band concert.

Sorry to say, but that big ol’ jet airliner fills me with memories of frustration and disappointment.  The whirlwind of teenage hormone and chemical consciousness grew ripe in the lawn of that amphitheater.  Particularly struck was a nubile young nymph in a high-cropped t-shirt showing a midsection I’ve never seen comparable on another woman.  She approached my friend and I with a face of chemically misguided intent on the legs of a baby horse taking its first steps.

Quickly I learned I was not her target.  She was after my friend, who had a girlfriend, and I endured an entire night of this downright abnormally attractive woman desperately putting the moves on a man who’d have none.  Many times I tried to redirect her attention from my friend onto me, even with the help of said friend, but she remained undeterred, even to the point of asking me what was wrong with my friend.  Why wouldn’t he maul her?

Staring out 200 yards away at the stage the Steve Miller Band played oblivious to my problems.  The soundtrack to the height of my frustration, Big Ol’ Jet Airliner.  Yes, carry me far away; far, far away for this inescapable madness.  It’s not here that I want to stay!

That jet airliner carried me ten years later to now.  No one to my knowledge made the nymph that night.  Even if the tables turned, and I did roll around in the cool lawn with this teenage aberration, my luck would have left me with cold sores at best.  A worst I’d have made her my wife after knocking her up at 17.  I’d bounce from factory temp jobs while she’d stay at home with the kids and whatever drug dealer she was romping with while I was away.  And as I’d watch her perfect body quickly deteriorate, I’d be wishing I was where I am right now.

Even as time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping; the frustrations of that night diminish more and more.  The only regrets now are those felt by my friend, whose girlfriend he so supernaturally maintained his loyalty for repaid him by dropping him on his ass a few weeks later.  Now everytime I see him he mentions what could have been.  Time has made the memory nothing to get excited about, kind of like the Steve Miller Band.