There. I did it — I think.
I was recently ruminating on the ability to do, say, or experience something unique. This thought process was touched off when I pulled out an old cassette (yes, some people still have these!) to run through the car cassette player. This particular tape was bequeathed to me by a friend circa 1986, and has a bunch o’ tunes on it that reside nowhere else in my music library (a condition which I mean to rectify). In fact, this tape introduced me to several artists and genres that influenced my musical growth – although some would not view it as “growth” per se – and radically changed, essentially, my life. Artists such as Billy Bragg, The Proclaimers, Voice of the Beehive, and Morrissey inhabit this tape, and this simple spool of magnetized metal oxide particles on polyester (a Maxell XLII 90 – I always bought these!) shaped what I would listen to for the rest of my life, and in doing so, broadened my horizons incalculably.
ANYHOW…back on point: I had not pulled out this tape in many a moon, and was reveling in all the great tunes I had not heard in some time. Whilst jamming to Blush by The Hummingbirds, the thought popped into my head that I was most likely the only person in the world – and thus, the Universe! – currently listening to that song (although I am not taking into account parallel Universes or quantum states). I calculated the odds as pretty good: an obscure – my most standards – Australian band that hasn’t been together in 15 years, unknown to probably 99.9993% of the world’s population (and I assure you, that figure was derived in a wholly scientific fasion…), and receiving zero – or approaching that – airplay. I did have to factor in the Internets (all of them). And I was mildly surprised to find that some other persona aficionada a la música had placed a video of this tune on youtube (said link listed above). But as the last comment was left over a week ago, and there had been only 4,353 views in over 14 months – only about 10 per day – I felt it was safe to say that it probably wasn’t being watched at the same moment at which I was listening to it on my retro car stereo.
To be unique in a world of 6,000,000,000+ souls – and that’s only the living! – is a difficult thing. It is almost assured that someone somewhere is doing what you’re doing, thinking what you’re thinking, eating what you’re eating, viewing what you’re viewing, etc. So I felt – for one brief, transcendent moment – the awesomeness of “doing” something (however small) that no one else in a span of untold light-years was.
Which then brings me to the singular title of this post: I am quite convinced that this series of words, in this specific order, has never been uttered – or written – before in the history of humankind. Uniqueness. Something for which we all at some time strive.