The last time I saw Phoebe Bridgers, we were both quite different than now. She played the Surly outdoor venue in frighteningly near-post-COVID environment. Our vaccines were still fresh. I joked that I had never been to a concert with shorter beer lines and more people sitting down and crying. I remember that Bridgers stopped the show at one point because she noticed a fan struggling at the front of the crowd. Dehydration, bad trip, a minor menty b, whatever it was she saw it and made sure that person was taken care of. How many ascending acts are paying that much attention to the crowd? Later, when Bridgers had to exit the venue by walking across a bare field next to the stage to a waiting car, a mass of fans rushed to the closest fence just to see her, get a little closer to her. It wasn't a menacing sort of crowd encroachment, though. More like the way an eager niece runs up to a cool aunt.

Five years later, at a packed and frothing arena show, Bridgers took multiple opportunities to walk through the crowd and touch her fans. To a jaded aging dude, it could feel lame. Hundreds of people pressing to the fences to brush their hand against hers. But the ripple through the crowd as she passed said it all. The world was still scary in Summer 2021 and has only gotten scarier. In a world where the rich and influential are ever more cloistered from the world, Bridgers seems to understand the connection, communion really, that her fans desire, need. She didn't have to walk among her people. But she did and almost missed her cue for a song because she walked slowly enough to take it in.

I was 32 the last time I saw Phoebe Bridgers play. Now she’s 32. How have we both changed since then? Her father died in the intervening years. She talked about him on stage. Her appreciation for him, which seems hard won. I think about my dad’s mortality all the time. He’s fine for now. We all are, until we’re not. She was dating Irish hearthrob Paul Mescal back then. Now she’s with fellow professionally funny and sad person Bo Burnham. I’m still with the same person I was at that 2021 show with. But we had a kid and one of us had cancer, and I suppose we're changed in some of the ways you'd think those things would change you (and some that you wouldn't think of). Phoebe is more famous now. Am I? More people know who I am, I guess. The Onion Guy follows me on a second-tier microblogging site. That's gotta count for something, even if he has me muted. 32 can be pretty good, Phoebe. Please enjoy it. I tried and I don't regret it.

One of my grad school friends got me into Phoebe Bridgers. When she invited me and my wife to the 2021 show she did so in an act of total vulnerability. You're going to see me cry, I may not be well, but I want to share this with you. We had a great time. My wife was pregnant with Hank at the time. This afternoon, that kid sat on the floor of the living room and played my 27-year-old Nintendo 64. Bridgers was 27 the last time I saw her. It's weird how these numbers echo even if they don't mean anything. I don't know why seeing my son happily struggle to figure out the controls to Banjo-Kazooie made me so bittersweet. I remember when that friend held Hank for the first time. She barely knew what to do with a baby but she was almost giddy. I think we were both sad kids, but even sad kids spend a lot of their time happy.

Bridgers' song “Kyoto” is ecstatically true to me. I also dream melancholy dreams of places and a past that's half gone by, half never was. When Pheebs sings "Jesus Christ, I'm so blue all the time / And that's just how I feel / Always have and I always will" and 10,000 young women sing along so sad and earnest it breaks my heart because I know they feel it like I did and do and they still have so far to go and they're just kids and god I know that melancholy kid will always live inside you no matter how much joy you find and you want to deny these children their feelings because it hurts a little too much to see yourself in them through the singer.

I think my friend and I have happy lives. I don't really know Phoebe Bridgers but I hope she's happy. Or at least happier than she was when she wrote "And last night, I blacked out in my car / And I woke up in my childhood bed / Wishing I was someone else, feeling sorry for myself / When I remembered someone's kid is dead." My kid apologized to me when he accidentally made the video game bear fall off a fake bridge into a pool of water. You don't have to apologize, it's just a game, I told him with a smile. He smiled back, but I see my own childhood sensitivity in him. In 2021 and last night, Phoebe sang "And sometimes in the pouring rain / He'll fall in the mud and get back up again," and it's crushing sometimes to think how much is ahead of my beautiful little baby boy. Good and ill.