Greg Wilkovich
HFA: Selected Stories and Found Items is the end result of eighteen months of writing, compiling and introspection by author Greg Wilkovich. Part autobiography and part life observations, HFA provides the reader with the author’s fractured and dry humor while quietly illustrating how he’d gotten to the end result (i.e., this collection). After a life of hard living and absurd situations, many people often comment what a great book their life would make. HFA is a particularly discordant and brutally honest example of such a catharsis.
Greg Wilkovich was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylania, and has spent most of his life in Maryland. Greg left the University of Maryland in 1997 with a B.A. in English, countless frat party stories, two concussions and an insatiable love of writing. Though he never did land that job with the English Company, Greg continues to write for as long as he can remain awake. He has been featured in numerous regional newspapers (Volume Magazine, You Could Do Worse, St. Pete Weekly), contributed to a handful of literary websites (WiredFiction.com, Thriftgoddess.com), and authored several collections of poetry.
Random works at the gas station
“Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.” Louis Pasteur
Do you think that Thomas Jefferson got blind stinking drunk on July Fourth? Because I was. And I can’t really speak for Thomas Paine’s breakfast that day but I know mine consisted of screwdrivers and bacon.
Between sessions of staring at out the window and mindlessly shoving food and liquor into my face, I contemplated how I could use my Independence Day as something special. Seriously, who can’t change themselves with the snap of a finger?
I stared at the word independence on the calendar until it was 3-D. Freedom from control.
The more it fluxed around my skull the more absurd it became. I couldn’t touch it; it didn’t exist. You can’t lasso an electron because you can’t really peg something down that you can’t see. My freedom was now quantum physics.
In the late afternoon I began to feel lonely, so I decided to drive to the Trifecta to see if anyone was around. Rob’s little brother must have seen me snooping around, and he came out to tell me that most everyone went to the Mall for the fireworks. Rob was still in bed, because the night before paramedics had to revive him out of a liquor and pills daze. That’s about all of the story I could get out of him.
So I left speechless and even more depressed. On a whim, I pulled into an Exxon station across the street to buy some cigarettes. I walked into the store and was greeted by nobody. I walked behind the counter – nobody. I walked into both the men’s and women’s bathrooms – nobody. I walked into the garage and called hello – nobody. All of a sudden I’d stepped into the Langoliers.
Still drunk, I began to have some evil thoughts, such as: “Well, I’ve stumbled across a ghost ship, so no one would be the wiser if I took a carton of cigarettes and some sodas.” I went as far as wondering where the tape to the security cameras was located.
In my mind I’d decided that it was ‘civil disobedience’ and not ‘shoplifting.’
At least five minutes (or perhaps hours?) passed. Soon I believed that something could be very wrong. And yet all I could think about was stealing cigarettes or kicking over endcaps of two-liters. While I stood and pondered this, in a little office that connected the garage and the store, the telephone rang. I was either on some ‘it’ll be funny later’ hidden camera show or in the middle of a horrible crime scene, so I decided that I might as well play along.
“Hello, gas station.” I tried my best not to laugh.
I was greeted by a deep and scratchy female voice. “…is Paul working?”
For a moment I looked around for Paul, as if his having a name would animate him somehow. “Um…I don’t know.”
“Well, who’s there?” she asked.
“No one, actually. I’m just some guy that wanted to buy cigarettes.”
I was given silence, and then, “…so Paul isn’t there?”
“No, listen, NO ONE is here, and actually I’m freaking out a little.”
“…oh. Okay, thanks.”
I then decided that I didn’t care if it was a television show or a robbery/murder – I was too drunk to deal with either one. I wanted to go home, I wanted my couch, and I wanted to burn the fingerprints off of my fingers.
As I exited the station, a man with a large frame and a greasy Exxon shirt rounded the side of the building and asked me if I needed help. I decided to follow him back inside because he was eyeballing me as if I’d gone ahead with stealing tobacco and kicking over displays.
While Paul was taking the money for my purchase the phone rang again. He picked it up.
“Hi, Exxon Severna Park…yeah…huh?…nah, I was around back…around back!…nothing!…pumping kerosene, doing stuff, nothing!…huh?…(looks up at me)…from the booth….nah, customers can reach the phone from the booth…yeah, it’s weird…look I gotta go…nah…nah!…nothing!…bye.”
We dumbly looked at each other. Paul spoke first.
“Have a nice day.”
I pocketed a book of matches. “You too.”
I felt as if I’d been busted until speculating that perhaps I’d busted him, too. But whatever he was doing behind the building for that long couldn’t have been any more negligent than anything I’d been doing that day.
Still unsure as to what to do next, I pushed myself on down the road to the mall and bought myself a cheeseburger to sober up.
As I sat in the food court I tried to look as low-key as I could because all I could think was, “…they know. They know.”
Weeks later I came across a quote that dog-eared the uncertainty of the chasms between what is and what isn’t: “The act of observing something happening causes a change in the thing being observed.”
It appears as that the electrons of an atom don’t truly ‘exist’ by virtue of their purpose around the atom. Since its constantly moving and without a definite home, it doesn’t exist. I can’t necessarily dispute the difference between an electron and its trajectory, the distinction between an event and the existence of an event, or the transformation an object has before and after it’s given a name.
But I eventually decided with much conviction that solipsism is truly a liberating and empowering bitch.
