Tom DeLonge wrote "All the Small Things" in 1999 for a girlfriend who left roses on his staircase. The na na na's were a tribute to the Ramones. He made it deliberately simple so radio would play it, and it became blink-182's only top 10 hit, peaking at #6. Then his life went places no screenwriter would pitch. He married that girlfriend in 2001 and divorced in 2019. He quit the band in 2015 to chase UFOs full time, and for years he was the entertainment industry's favorite punchline. Except his company, To The Stars, released three Navy videos in 2017 that the Pentagon officially confirmed as genuine in 2020. By 2022, Congress was holding its first public UFO hearings in over 50 years, partly because a pop-punk guitarist refused to let it go. Around the same time, his best friend Mark Hoppus was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma. He beat it, and the scare put the band back together in 2022 after seven years apart. So now it's October 2026. His hometown Padres are down 0-2 in the NLDS, facing elimination, and a packed Petco Park starts singing a 27-year-old song he wrote about roses on a staircase. He's standing behind the netting in a Padres hat, crying. The girl is gone and the band broke up twice. The government eventually admitted he wasn't crazy. The three chords outlasted every bit of it. He wrote the simplest song he possibly could, and it turned out to be the most durable thing he ever made.