Greg Tulonen | Secrets

Greg Tulonen Secrets is a series of completely true anecdotes, situations, and revelations from the author's life, presented here in this space in the hope that they will amuse, inspire, and (occasionally) relay an incredibly embarrassing incident.

Navigate by using the left and right arrows, or by jumping to specific seasons below. The site is also searchable. Use the search box above to look for particular names or keywords.

Season One (9/7/2020–1/17/2021)
Season Two (1/17/2022–8/5/2022)
Season Three (3/14/2023–9/19/2024)
Season Four (8/18/2025–present)

9/7/2020

Hello, and welcome to the first episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My favorite brand of popcorn kernels is Orville Redenbacher. I still remember the commercials from the '70s and '80s in which Redenbacher himself asserted that his kernels popped up lighter and fluffier than the leading brands, and I've found that to be true in real life. But I like the Pop Secret popcorn kernel container better, because the lid is a half-cup measuring cup, perfect for measuring out the kernels before popping.

So, what I do is, I buy Orville Redenbacher popcorn kernels and I transfer the kernels into an empty Pop Secret container. If you ever looked in my kitchen cabinet, you might think I had (expired) Pop Secret popcorn kernels in there, but I really don't. They're Orville Redenbacher popcorn kernels in disguise.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/9/2020

Hello, and welcome to the second episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the early '00s, I wrote for an online humor magazine called Satireville, an Onionesque site with a slight focus on Western Massachusetts politics and culture. I wrote under the pseudonym George Cotton Strunly (an anagram of Gregory Scott Tulonen) because my regular job (at a news website) did not permit me to write for an outside organization, particularly a satirical news site.

One day, at my regular job, a colleague told me about a story he'd read in Satireville, one I happened to have written—though he didn't know that; it was just a story he'd read that he thought was funny. I wanted so badly to say "I wrote that!", but this was in front of my boss (who, if he's reading this, may be learning about all of this for the first time), so all I could do was say, "That sounds funny" and go back to my desk.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/11/2020

Hello, and welcome to the third episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Sometimes, when I give my name over the phone, I'll be asked "Is that Gregg with two Gs?" Invariably, I will answer, "Yes. But not in a row." This response usually elicits either silence or confusion, so I will offer this clarification: "Otherwise my name would be Gre."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/13/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fourth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Back in the '90s, my boss brought in for me, unsolicited and unbidden, a jar of homemade puttanesca sauce. I thanked her, brought it home, stuck it in my fridge, and promptly forgot all about it until a few weeks later, when my boss asked me how I had enjoyed her homemade puttanesca sauce. Compelled to honesty for reasons that now escape me, I admitted that I had not tried her homemade puttanesca sauce.

Undaunted, she brought in a second jar of homemade puttanesca sauce and proceeded to pester me about it daily until I actually did try it. As it turns out, I did not like her homemade puttanesca sauce at all, but burned by my previous bout with honesty, I told my boss that I had loved it. This seemed to please her no end, and she asked me to return the empty container, which I promptly did, at which point she promptly refilled the container with a new batch of homemade puttanesca sauce and gave it to me.

Thus began a bizarre ritual from which I could see no escape. Every week or so, she would ask for the return of the empty puttanesca sauce container, which I would dutifully bring back into the office, and which she would dutifully refill with more homemade puttanesca sauce, which I would dutifully take home and throw out. To this day, the phrase "homemade puttanesca sauce" fills me with nausea and dread. Eventually, I had to leave that job just to end the cycle.

As it happens, I left for another job in the same company. During my interview, my future boss (who was friends with my old boss) asked me, her eyebrow raised in curious skepticism, "What's with you and the puttanesca sauce?"

I confessed everything, asking her to keep it to herself. She promised she would.

She didn't.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/15/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fifth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In second grade, we hand-painted mugs for our mothers for Mother's Day. All of the kids were putting "MOM" on their mugs, but I wanted mine to be truly personalized, so I asked my mother how she spelled her name, and the next day I painted "JOANNE" on the mug for her, even though I had never called her anything but "Mom." The other kids teased me about this, for daring to address my mother (if only in mug form) by her first name. God knows why they even cared, but they teased me about it, so when Father's Day rolled around and we did it all again, I painted "DAD" on the mug for my dad, even though I had never called him anything but "Rod."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/17/2020

Hello, and welcome to the sixth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

(Warning: This one has a kind-of gross part.)

When I was seventeen, I worked for one day on a cattle ranch, helping the ranch hands brand and castrate the calves. When you think of a calf, you might think of a cute little animal, but I'm here to tell you that a three-month-old Angus weighs over 200 pounds and comes up to my clavicle. (It also does NOT want to be branded or castrated.) On the day, three buddies and I stood in a fenced-in area on the ground with the calves, while ranch hands on horseback rode around us, roping the calves one by one. Once a calf was roped, it was our job to tackle it to the ground and hold it there, usually landing in quite a lot of cowshit as we did so. (That isn't the kind-of gross part. As one of my buddies explained to me before we started, "Shit washes off.")

We'd hold the animal in place as a ranch hand dismounted his horse and did what needed to be done. The branding worked about the way you probably think branding works (one calf kicked me so hard in the chest I was bruised for two weeks), but you might be surprised how the castration worked. The ranch hand would make a small incision in the scrotum and then suck out the testes with his mouth, bite them off, and spit them on the ground. (That's the kind-of gross part, in case you were wondering.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/19/2020

Hello, and welcome to the seventh episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I have voted in eight presidential elections. Four times I voted for the winner; four times I voted for the loser. 2020 will be a tie-breaker.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

UPDATE 2024: We're tied again.

9/21/2020

Hello, and welcome to the eighth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Sometime in the late '80s or early '90s, my dad bought himself a minivan. I'm not sure why. He was living alone at the time, and most of his driving was done solo, so what did he need with a minivan? If I ever knew the answer to that question, I've forgotten it, but I do remember that it made him happy.

He let me drive it when I came home for summer break. One morning, I took him to work and then drove to the grocery store to buy myself some Ben & Jerry's.

When I came out of the store, I got into the minivan, but I couldn't get it started. I don't mean the engine wouldn't turn over. I mean, I couldn't even get the key to turn. You know how sometimes, the key won't turn, but you jiggle the steering wheel a little and then you're fine? This wasn't that. I jiggled that steering wheel like it was a vending machine with the last bag of Funyuns stuck inside. Nothing.

There I was, sitting in my dad's minivan, trying to figure out what to do next. I could find a payphone and call my dad at work, but then what? I had his car. What was he gonna do? Leave work and hitchhike to the grocery store? I could find a payphone and call the police, but what were they gonna do? Come down and arrest me for being such a loser? So, I just sort of hung my head in defeat like Charlie Brown after a baseball game, and that's when I saw a baby pacifier on the passenger seat.

At that time, there were no babies in the family.

I thought about that, about the baby pacifier, for about a tenth of a second, and while I was thinking about it, the side door of the minivan slid open, and a woman started loading up a baby into a heretofore unnoticed infant car seat in the back seat. I could see this clearly in the rearview mirror.

You got it a little faster than I did: This was not my dad's minivan.

As you might imagine, this was kind of an awkward moment for me. I couldn't say anything without alerting this woman to my presence. But I also couldn't exit the vehicle without alerting this woman to my presence. And she was seconds away from being alerted to my presence anyway simply by virtue of possessing a pair of eyes.

"Um," I said (because you have to start somewhere).

"I think you're in the wrong car," the woman said, far more calmly and cheerfully than I deserved. "Is that your wife loading groceries in the car next to this one?"

I looked to my left, and indeed, there was an identical minivan parked directly next to this one, with a young woman loading groceries into it. I had never seen her before in my life.

"Yes," I said, because at that point it seemed simpler to agree, and I hastily exited the vehicle, uttering all appropriate apologies. Then I sort-of hung out on the periphery of both vehicles until the woman with the baby had pulled away, lest she wonder why I was also walking away from my "wife." Then, I started to look for my dad's minivan in earnest.

Here's the embarrassing part. (I know what you're thinking: "That wasn't the embarrassing part?") It turned out, when I did find my dad's minivan, it was an entirely different color than the minivan I had entered. Like, the minivan I had gotten into was red, but my dad's minivan was blue. Yeah, I don't know. To my enormous relief, it started up right away, and when I got back to my dad's house, the Ben & Jerry's was delicious.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time

9/23/2020

Hello, and welcome to the ninth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I have a memory from my childhood that doesn't quite make sense to me now, but it's quite clear, and I'm reasonably sure of its accuracy.

This would have been around May 1984. I went to see the movie The Dead Zone with my dad and then-stepmother Jackie. During the opening credits, Jackie became quite visibly agitated. After some frantic whispering between Jackie and my dad, my dad informed me that we were leaving. Awkwardly gathering up my jacket and my popcorn and my soda, I asked what was wrong, but my dad said nothing until we out in the hallway, where he explained that Jackie just really, really hated Martin Sheen, and would be unable to tolerate watching any movie with him in it.

Rather than leave the theater, we snuck into another movie, which was just starting. The other movie was, coincidentally, another Stephen King adaptation, Firestarter. During the opening credits of Firestarter, which were unspooling as we took our seats, Martin Sheen's name was clearly featured.

Uh oh, I thought to myself, I guess we're leaving this one too.

But nothing happened. I thought maybe my dad and Jackie had somehow both missed the credit, and I white-knuckled my way through the movie's opening scenes, awaiting the inevitable freakout. But when Martin Sheen eventually showed up, nothing happened. We sat through the entire movie without any apparent distress on Jackie's part, and nobody said a word about it afterwards.

To this day, I have no idea what that was about. My dad is no longer alive, and I've had no contact with Jackie in over thirty years, so I will likely never know.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

09/25/2020

Hello, and welcome to the tenth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In college, I very briefly sort-of dated a woman, who on our first sort-of date stole a Ben & Jerry's napkin dispenser for me from the Ben & Jerry's scoop shop in Burlington, Vermont. (I still have it. You can see it in this photo.)

Despite this promising beginning, things didn't progress very far with this woman. You see, this was during a short period between her break-up with her boyfriend and her reconciliation with her boyfriend.

Life went on, and by senior year, I was keeping condoms in that napkin dispenser, because it turned out to be a convenient and discreet storage container.

One day, after a long absence from my social circle, this woman was visiting my dorm room, and she saw the dispenser on the shelf next to my bed. She picked it up and asked if it needed more napkins, making a move as if to open it.

"Give me that," I said, hugely embarrassed, and snatched it out of her hand, placing it gently but firmly back on the shelf. She was clearly nonplussed by this behavior, but I offered her no explanation.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/27/2020

Hello, and welcome to the eleventh episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I lived in Massachusetts, my landlord was a newspaper reporter. Sometimes, late at night when he was up against a deadline, he'd call me to get a "man on the street"-type quote for his story. "What do you think about the rising cost of heating oil?" he'd ask me (for example). "I think my wife and I are gonna have to start wearing more sweaters," I'd say. And the next day, there'd be a story in the paper about the rising cost of heating oil, in which Northampton resident Greg Tulonen would be quoted as saying, "I think my wife and I are going to have to start wearing more sweaters."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/29/2020

Hello, and welcome to the twelfth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One of my first dates with my wife Kate was to see the movie "Pushing Tin" at a movie theater outside of Boston. After the movie, I went into the men's room, and I noticed a handsomely printed sign that advised "HAND DRYERS ONLY NOW AVAILABLE IN RESTROOMS."

Now, I suppose there might be a couple of ways to interpret that sign. Maybe it means that only just now have hand dryers become available in the restrooms. But it could also mean that hand dryers are now the only hand-drying option in the restrooms, to the exclusion of all other other hand-drying methods. (This is the more likely interpretation, I think you'd agree.)

However, the sign was affixed to a fully stocked paper towel dispenser, and there were no hand dryers anywhere at all. So neither interpretation really works.

The existence of this sign amused me, so (as you might have guessed from the photo) I stole it.

When I came out of the bathroom (sign discreetly tucked inside my shirt), I saw that Kate was waiting for me with a bemused and quizzical expression on her face, and I knew that she was about to tell me about a similar situation in the women's room.

"There's a sign in the bathroom..." she began, as we made our way towards the door.

"Uh huh," I prompted.

"...that says 'hand dryers only' are available in the restrooms..."

"Yeah?" I said.

"...but there are no hand dryers and the sign was on a paper towel dispenser!"

"You don't say," I said.

"Is there a sign like that in the men's room?" she asked.

"No," I answered, truthfully, declining to add, "not anymore."

By this point, we were outside, in the parking lot.

"Anyway, isn't that weird?" said Kate.

"Well, let me ask you something," I said.

"What?"

"This sign you saw?" I said, retrieving the pilfered sign from under my shirt. "Did it look anything like this?"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/1/2020

Hello, and welcome to the thirteenth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I worked in Portland, the deli where I often got my lunch put up a weekly brain teaser on a dry erase board near the door, usually a riddle or a math puzzle or a logic problem or a word game. At the end of the week, answers were drawn at random from the fishbowl set up next to the board, and the author of the first correct answer drawn got a free lunch.

I very much wanted to win this contest. I entered it every week (always with the correct answer), but my name was never drawn from that fishbowl. One week, though, I was feeling pretty confident, because I had entered my answer on Monday, and as of Thursday afternoon, mine was still the only entry in the fishbowl. I mentioned this to my coworker, Torrey Ham, who quietly absorbed my optimism, and said nothing.

Then on Monday afternoon, Torrey came into my office with a cellphone in his hand and a huge grin on his face. "I want to play a message for you," he said. "I think you'll find it interesting." He hit his speakerphone button and I heard: "Hello, Torrey. We just wanted to let you know that you're the winner of our weekly brain teaser, so come on in for a free lunch..."

(In case it isn't clear, Torrey is the villain of this story.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/3/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fourteenth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My porn star name, using the first-pet / street-you-grew-up-on formula, would be Demetrius Longwood, which is just about perfect.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/5/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fifteenth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once broke my arm doing a card trick.

This is what happened. I was taking a college video-making class, and one assignment was to play with perspective, so I decided to videotape myself upside-down, performing feats of levitation "magic" that were actually just gravity. (You know: Watch this card float "up" when it's really falling down. Penn and Teller did the same thing on SNL in the '80s.) I searched for some playing cards, which were harder to find than you might guess, but I finally snagged a deck from my friend Matt, telling him only that I needed it for a card trick, but offering no further details.

Then I scouted around for an appropriate place from which I could hang upside-down, finally settling on my friend Andyh's loft bed. Andy wasn't around, but I got the okay from his roommate, Jim. I took some time positioning the camera upside-down (tricky without a tripod), placing a floor lamp upside-down to supply lighting in the wrong direction, and flipping all the posters on the wall behind where I would perform. Then, feeling a bit shy, I waited until Jim was in the bathroom before I actually tried to shoot a take.

On my first try, I fell out of Andy's loft and broke my arm.

Jim came back into the room and I told him I thought I probably had to go to the hospital, but my video assignment was due tomorrow so could he please help me finish it up? I hadn't really been able to get the camera positioned properly, so we had Jim's girlfriend, Katherine, hold the camera. Then Jim held my legs while I hung upside-down and, in a great deal of pain, performed my routine. Katherine was laughing so hard, the camerawork was a swooping, jittery mess, but we got the assignment done. Then I went to the hospital and got my arm set in a cast.

The next time I saw Matt, he took one look at my cast and said, "Something go wrong with the card trick?"

He was joking, of course, and surprised when I honestly replied, "Actually? Yes."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/7/2020

Hello, and welcome to the sixteenth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

After college, I stayed with a friend in New Jersey while I looked for work in Manhattan. Every morning, I'd take a four-dollar bus ride into the city, and every afternoon, I'd take a four-dollar bus ride back to New Jersey. One day, I splurged a little on lunch, leaving myself with no cash, which I knew would be no problem because I had a check from my dad that I planned on cashing at a check-cashing place. Only, when I got to the check-cashing place, I found out that they didn't cash personal checks. So, I was stuck in Manhattan with no money and no way to get back to New Jersey. I didn't even have the money to make a call from a payphone. I was truly stuck.

I thought about my situation for a little while, and then I went to the New York Public Library, where earlier, I had noticed that the color copier (which cost four dollars per copy) was out of order. I took the OUT OF ORDER sign off the top of the copier and I placed it underneath.

Then I went to the librarian and said, "There seems to be a problem with the color copier" (which was not a lie).

"The color copier is out of order," she told me. "There's a sign."

"There's no sign visible," I assured her (also not a lie).

She frowned and went with me to the color copier, where we discovered that the OUT OF ORDER sign had somehow slipped off the top of the copier and fallen underneath.

"I'm very sorry about this," said the librarian.

"These things happen," I said (which was true; these things do happen).

"Let me get you four dollars out of the till."

"I really appreciate it," I said, which was completely genuine.

So, as you can see, I did not lie in order to obtain that money. If the librarian drew an erroneous conclusion, that's on her, right?

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

UPDATE: After I originally posted this secret, my mother urged me to atone for my long-ago petty larceny, and to send a donation to the New York Public Library, along with this story.

Mindful of interest, I used a loan calculator, and—assuming a fixed 5% interest rate over a 28-year loan term—learned that the total interest on four dollars would be $3.44. Then I sent the NYPL twenty bucks, with no explanation at all. (Their donation page does not give the option for a personal message; otherwise, I would have.)

10/9/2020

Hello, and welcome to the seventeenth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I saw "Raiders of the Lost Ark" when I was 12 years old, and, as it did for so many people that year, it:

Blew. Me. Away.

I loved every second of that movie. It felt like it was plugged directly into my central nervous system. My mom, on the other hand, thought it was "stupid," a reaction so baffling to me, it was as if she'd told me she thought breathing was stupid, or maybe freedom.

I loved the second movie too, even though a lot of fans didn't (and in retrospect, its virulently racist caricatures and cocky colonialism are pretty icky), and the third one was a ton of fun, especially the Ford-Connery banter. I just really loved that whole world, those '30s-set, globetrotting, supernatural action-adventures, hung together by jaw-dropping stunts and Harrison Ford's charm.

Over the next couple of decades, my movie tastes got a little more sophisticated, Harrison Ford became something of a glowering sourpuss, and George Lucas seemed to lose touch with the storytelling wizardry that had fueled his imagination in the '70s and '80s. Still, I was excited to see the long-delayed fourth movie in the franchise. As I told a co-worker at the time: "I'm just going to go in with an open mind, a giant tub of popcorn, and a Coke the size of my head. And I'm going to pretend like hell that I'm twelve years old again."

There were a couple of problems with that plan though. First of all, I just wasn't that crazy about movie theater popcorn anymore, with its stale, chewy kernels and its greasy, fake butter goo. I vastly preferred good-old-fashioned home-popped popcorn, flavored with real butter and nutritional yeast.

Second of all, for some reason, it seems like every restaurant, bar, diner, deli, and, yes, movie theater in Maine serves Pepsi instead of Coke. I tell you, it's like Communist Russia up here. The devil has the people by the throat.

Fortunately, I devised a clever plan to defeat the evil movie theater overlords. I popped and nutritional-yeasted a batch of my own popcorn and transferred it into multiple plastic containers, I got myself a couple of bottled Cokes, and then I duct-taped everything to the inside lining of my raincoat. Genius!

So there I was at the movie theater on the day, smuggling in my ill-gotten booty. "I am such a badass," I actually thought to myself as I slipped past the ushers and strode with seeming confidence across the movie theater lobby.

And that's when the duct tape gave way and a small container of popcorn fell with a clattering plop onto the lobby floor.

Under the puzzled gaze of the movie theater staff, I collected the container with all the grace I could muster and hustled into the movie theater, unpursued by the management.

After the movie (about which the less said the better), I accidentally left my hat behind in the theater, such a supremely un-Indy-esque move, it was a perfect cap to the experience.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/11/2020

Hello, and welcome to the eighteenth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Food packaging that comes in resealable plastic bags is my kryptonite. No matter how hard I press those top two edges together, I can never get them to adhere. I have no problem with actual Ziploc bags or their generic equivalents, but if food comes prepackaged in packaging that's resealable with a Ziploc-like seal at the top, I can never, ever get it to close.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/13/2020

Hello, and welcome to the nineteenth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the summer of 1990, I lived and worked on campus at Middlebury College, along with Chad Anderson, Scott Westerbeke, Derek Dalmer, and a bunch of other people who aren't in this story (Hi, Natalya!).

One weekend that summer, I drove all night down to Washington D.C. to see a few Potomac Theatre Project (PTP) productions starring some Middlebury classmates, and then drove straight back to Vermont, with zero sleep in between.

When I arrived back at Middlebury (around midnight), I discovered that Chad, Scott, and Derek were building up a head of steam to go to Denny's in Burlington, which was about a 45-minute drive further north. I'd been up for 48 hours straight and was riding a sleep-deprivation high, so I said sure, I'll drive.

About an hour or so later, sitting in that Denny's, those 49 hours caught up with me and I felt myself crashing hard. "I think somebody else better drive back," I said.

"I'm too drunk," said Scott.

"I'm too drunk," said Derek.

"I can't drive stick shift," said Chad.¹

So, it fell to me to gut it out and get us back to Middlebury. As soon as we started up, Chad, Scott, and Derek went to sleep, and the only sounds keeping me awake were the low drone of the engine and the hum of the tires rumbling over asphalt.
The fog was very thick that night, a heavy woolen blanket shrouding the car, and I could see no more than a few yards in front of us. It was like driving through a blizzard. It was like driving through a blank void.

About halfway home, sleep deprivation got the better of me and I started to hallucinate. I saw the branches of the trees beside the road take the form of... creatures, long and spindly... reaching out through the fog to grab me through the windshield. I think I might have whimpered.

Now, the smart thing to do in this situation, obviously, would have been to pull over and rest until I could see and think straight, but, well, I wasn't thinking straight. So, I kept going, and a thousand years later, we arrived back in Middlebury.
As I pulled to a stop, Chad, Scott, and Derek stirred awake and mumbled thanks for driving, but I was too tired to respond.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹UPDATE: After I originally posted this secret, Chad weighed in with an origin story for his stick-shift ignorance:

I can't drive stick shift because my mom told a family friend's son that if he needed her car for an emergency while she and his parents were out of town, he was welcome to use it. Instead, he drove it around the entire week and, of course, totaled it. And so, the stick-shift car was not there for me to learn to drive on, and her next car was an automatic. So what I'm saying is that Eric Dixon almost got us all killed. Butterfly effect!

10/15/2020

Hello, and welcome to the twentieth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

It may be hard for people to tell sometimes, depending on time of day or how bright it is outside, but that's Batman behind the window shade in all of my work Zoom calls.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/17/2020

Hello, and welcome to the twenty-first episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I've previously confessed to my difficulty resealing resealable food storage bags. Conversely, I can never tear perforated paper perfectly along the perforated line. No matter how careful I try to be, my tear always strays from the perforation. Always.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/19/2020

Hello, and welcome to the twenty-second episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I worked for a news website in Massachusetts that had a corporate parent in New Jersey. From time to time, representatives from our parent company would travel up to Massachusetts for an all-day, all-staff, all-boring meeting. At one such meeting, while one of the executives droned on and on, Jennifer Myszkowski and I were amusing ourselves with a very discreet game of hangman, surreptitiously marking our responses to each other in the margin of a corporate handout lying between us on the conference table. Jennifer had me stumped with L O _ _ O _ E. I kept guessing letters, one after the other, but I just kept getting closer and closer to being hung. I was baffled. That arrangement of letters didn't fit any word in the English language. What could it possibly be? Nothing fit. Nothing.

Suddenly, it hit me like a blow from a ball-peen hammer: It wasn't a word, it was a name—specifically, the name of our colleague, Lou Cove. Jennifer saw the realization hit me (I think I may have gasped) and desperately struggled to hold in giant peals of laughter. She was practically vibrating, tears welling in her eyes, as she held in her mirth. I soon joined her in these painfully contained hysterics. At the head of the conference table, the executive droned on, oblivious (hopefully).

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/21/2020

Hello, and welcome to the twenty-third episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Every once in a while, somebody says something to you that changes your life. It could be a simple thing. Often it IS a simple thing. But once you hear it, you are forever changed. This is a story about one of those times.

For years, I dressed myself by putting my pants on first, then my shirt. I didn't think about it too much, or at all. It's just the way I got myself dressed. I've always favored loose-fitting pants, so in order to keep my pants up while I got my shirt on, I'd have to make sure that they were zipped and snapped, and that a belt was in place and securely buckled. Then, I'd put my shirt on, and have to unbuckle and unfasten everything in order to tuck my shirt in, and already you've spotted the logical flaw with this process, but honestly, it never even occurred to me until one day, Matt Warren saw me unbuckling my pants and asked me what the hell I was doing. I told him that I was tucking my shirt in, and explained about having to fasten everything up in order to keep my pants up while I got my shirt on, and then having to unfasten everything to tuck my shirt in. Matt said, "Why don't you just put your shirt on first?" and it was like I was shot with a diamond bullet right through my forehead. I thought, "My God... the genius of that!"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/23/2020

Hello, and welcome to the twenty-fourth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In college, I saw a production of "Hamlet," with Christopher Duva as Hamlet and Natalya Baldyga as Gertrude. Just as Hamlet got to the line, "Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral bak'd-meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables," I (for reasons I can't explain even now) leaned back in my seat and mouthed that line in time with Duva in the direction of Tom Chambers, who was sitting five or six seats away from me, and who (oddly enough) was ALSO leaning back in his seat, ALSO mouthing that same line in my direction. We didn't plan this. We had never discussed that particular line before. We just both spontaneously and simultaneously, for no particular reason at all, decided to mouth that one line to each other just as Duva was reciting it.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/25/2020

Hello, and welcome to the twenty-fifth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I make a Sichuan recipe called ants climbing trees, which is a pork and noodle dish that both my younger child and I like a lot, but my wife and older child do not. I also make a cheese fondue that my wife and older child and I all like a lot, but my younger child does not. So, I always make the two dishes together, and I'm the only one who eats both.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/27/2020

Hello, and welcome to the twenty-sixth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was nine or ten years old, I dressed as the headless horseman (minus the horse) for Halloween. My costume consisted of stuffed paper bags affixed to my shoulders to elevate them, a large overcoat borrowed from my grandfather, buttoned up and draped over my head and shoulders, and a plastic jack-o-lantern in which to collect candy. My field of vision included everything I could see through the buttonhole in front of my eye, and thus my mobility was... somewhat limited.

My aunt Patty, with whom I was trick-or-treating, tolerated my plodding, tottering gait for as long as she could, which was (understandably) not very long, and then announced that I was no longer the headless horseman. I was now a hobo, which would entail wearing the overcoat normally and maybe tearing my shirt in a couple of places. So, that's what I did.

"I used to be the headless horseman and now I'm a hobo," I would explain to whoever came to the door at the various houses we visited.

"Greg, nobody cares!" Patty would advise, almost certainly accurately.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/29/2020

Hello, and welcome to the twenty-seventh episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Junior year of college, I dressed as a knight for a Halloween party. My costume was a painstakingly constructed cardboard suit of armor and helmet, and a pair of black rubber boots spray-painted silver. Before the party, my friend Tom Chambers and I got dangerously drunk on shot after shot of vodka, which caught up with me in a rather disastrous fashion at the party, in the middle of the dance floor.

My buddy Brad Wiss, whom I had known since my freshman year, noted my distress and quickly hustled me outside, where I was free to remove my helmet and befoul the snow-covered lawn. He then sat me down on steps and stayed with me to make sure I was okay. Brad was dressed as a pterodactyl, and I noticed that for reasons that eluded me (then and now), partygoers had been removing construction paper bats from the walls of the party and affixing them to Brad's costume throughout the night.

Brad talked to me for a good long while, very patient and kind, until I finally asked him something that had been bothering me since he had brought me outside.

"Who are you?" I said.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/31/2020

Hello, and welcome to the twenty-eighth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Twenty-eight years ago, I dressed up as the Joker for Halloween. I was living in New York City, and I'd been invited to a costume party hosted by my friends Jennifer Hart and Katherine Stebbins. I remember being on the subway on the way to their apartment, feeling pretty good about my getup. My jacket was great, my makeup was sensational. I had terrific props, like a squirting lapel flower and a gun that fired a "BANG!" flag. This was a good costume. A little boy sitting across from me on the subway stared at me, delighted and enthralled. I was feeling warm and happy and satisfied.

Then the door between subway cars opened and a guy poked his head into my compartment, shouting: "Joker suck my dick!" (all fast like that, with no comma). I looked up, but he was already gone.

And then I felt a bit sad. There's nothing like a stranger shouting "Joker suck my dick!" at you to make you feel kind of pathetic.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/2/2020

Hello, and welcome to the twenty-ninth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once applied for a digital media manager position at a multi-conglomerate whose primary product or purpose I have since forgotten. During my very long interview with the CEO, he didn't seem all that interested in talking about digital media management, but instead asked me quite a lot of questions about my political philosophy and heroes, and other questions about my writing background.

This all seemed pretty weird to me, until the true purpose of the interview was revealed. (Spoiler: It was not to fill a digital media manager position.) Two full hours into the interview, it emerged that the CEO was running for the U.S. Senate as an Independent. He asked me what I thought about that, and I told him bluntly but politely that he would not win this campaign, because an enormously popular former governor was also running, and his win was all but assured.

The CEO ignored this sage guidance and asked me to "co-write" (meaning ghost-write) a book for him that outlined his political ideas, incorporating historical examples stretching back to the country's founding. And he wanted it done in the next 30 days.

And so I did it, turning in (30 days later) a 60,000-word manuscript in which James Madison emerged as this fellow's historical hero. (Did you know that Madison went to the Constitutional Convention eleven days early and cranked out a first draft before anybody else arrived? That's how you make your mark on history. Show up early.)

The book was not traditionally published, but was privately printed, and handed to campaign rally attendees.

As expected, this guy didn't come even a little bit close to winning, but I did get paid, which was the only thing I cared about.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

NOTE: Technically, the publication of this secret lightly violates the NDA I signed when I took on the project, but I'm willing to live dangerously for my readers' entertainment. I sure hope it's appreciated, or at least that the CEO isn't reading this.

11/4/2020

Hello, and welcome to the thirtieth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was in high school, personal computers were still in their infancy. My math teacher Mr. Tone had a couple of Apple IIs in his room, and on those computers, I taught myself to code after school. (Yeah, I was kind of a nerd.) Sometimes, during the last five minutes of class, Mr. Tone let students play the computer game Snake Byte on those Apple IIs, so as a programming exercise (and obnoxious-teen-boy prank), I replaced Snake Byte's title screen with a message in big block letters: "MR. TONE IS A FINK!"

The prank worked beautifully: The Snake Byte title screen flashed only very briefly between levels, so when the first student saw it, she shouted in surprise, "Mr. Tone is a fink!" and by the time Mr. Tone turned around, the title screen had disappeared.

As soon as Mr. Tone saw the modified title screen for himself, he had only one suspect, but I still considered the entire endeavor to be well worth it.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/6/2020

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-first episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One time, in college, for pranking purposes and/or general jackassery, Chad Anderson and I decided we needed a key to our pal Scott Westerbeke's dorm room. So, we went to the campus security office and I told them that I was Scott Westerbeke and I had accidentally locked myself out of my dorm room and could I please have a replacement key?

"Sure," said the clerk. "I'll just need to see an ID."

"Everything is in my dorm room," I told her. "My wallet... Everything."

"All right. Can you confirm your date of birth?"

Seized with panic, I mumbled, "I forget," and slinked out of the office, followed by Chad.

Just as we got outside, I realized that I actually knew Scott's birthday. I said to Chad, "I actually know Scott's birthday."

"We've got to go back in," said Chad.

"I can't go back in," I said. "I told her I forgot my birthday!"

"Tell her you remembered!"

"I can't do that!"

"Sure you can!"

"No, I can't!"

"Yes, you can!"

The conversation continued in this vein for about ten minutes until Chad finally convinced me to give it a try.

So, I went back into the office and said, "My birthday is September 5, 1969. I just remembered," and without another word, the clerk handed over the key.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/8/2020

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-second episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once ironed Gilbert Gottfried's pants while Gottfried stood by in his underwear.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/10/2020

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-third episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

About ten years ago, I took Kate's Ford Escort to Pep Boys Auto Parts & Service in Auburn to get it inspected. They informed me that her car needed new tires and extensive brake work, including the rear brakes and the emergency brake, at a cost of about $675—but if I got the work done right away, they could give me a ten percent discount.

Since we didn't happen to have an extra $675-(675*.10)=$607.50 at that particular moment, I took Kate's car back home. Then we borrowed my mother-in-law's car, and kind of stuck our heads in the sand about the whole mess for about a week.

Then I took Kate's car to Rowe Ford Auburn for a second opinion, even though everybody says dealer garages are a rip-off. The guys at Rowe Ford took apart and re-assembled the brakes, found nothing wrong with either the brakes or the tires, and charged us $34.95. Plus, they re-inspected the car for free.

Getting a second opinion saved us $572.55. Admittedly, that was $572.55 we didn't happen to have at that particular moment (as I mentioned), but it felt pretty good all the same.

Always get a second opinion.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/12/2020

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-fourth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Longtime "Secrets" readers may recall an incident that occurred when I took a video-making course in college. An incident in which I broke my arm doing a card trick. An incident in which Matt Warren played a minor but crucial role (he supplied the cards). As it happens, Matt himself took that same video-making course two years later, and for one assignment, he asked me if he could operate the camera while standing up through my car's sunroof as I drove us into town to grab some lunch. ("Six Feet Under" was not yet a show, but years later, a similar scenario would open an episode, and would not end well.)

I agreed to this plan readily enough, but about one-twelfth of a second into our endeavor, we were pulled over by a Middlebury police officer.

(I should mention that Matt was wearing running shorts for this jaunt—running shorts with no pockets. This will be important in a minute.)

The police officer was hopping mad when he arrived at the driver's side window, his patience and humor no doubt sanded away by years of idiotic college student shenanigans. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he shouted as I rolled my window down.

"Sorry," I said. "It's for a class."

"A class?" The answer seemed to enrage him even further. "Is 'a class' worth being a goddamned idiot over?"

This seemed to me like a trick question. If I said "no," I was admitting to being a goddamned idiot, but if I said "yes," I was being a defiant smart-ass. So I just sort of shook my head spastically and prayed for mercy.

He leaned his head into the window and pointed at Matt. "I want to see your ID," he said. "You're the one who was being an idiot!"

Matt glanced at me, and I started to dig into my own pocket, because that's where Matt's wallet was.

"What the hell are you doing?" said the officer. "I asked to see HIS identification, not yours!"

"I have his wallet," I explained.

"Why does he have your wallet?" he demanded of Matt. At this point, he was ready to take offense at just about anything.

Matt shrugged guilelessly (but not without irritation) and said, "No pockets."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/14/2020

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-fifth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I've noticed that several of my secrets involve popcorn. Like for instance the Orville Redenbacher secret revealed in the very first episode, or the popcorn-smuggled-into-the-Indiana-Jones-movie secret revealed in episode seventeen. And now this one: When our older son was very little, Kate and I would sometimes make popcorn after he went to bed, specifically waiting until after he was asleep so we wouldn't have to share. One night, we were enjoying some after-hours popcorn when we heard the boy stirring upstairs. I went up to settle him and he asked me, "Daddy, why do I smell popcorn?"

"I don't know, buddy," I lied.

"Well, did you see anybody downstairs eating popcorn?" he said, like he was a detective, and there was maybe a drawing room full of suspects down there.

"I didn't see anybody," I said, still lying.

"Okay," he said, dubiously, and drifted back to sleep. Then I went downstairs and ate the rest of my popcorn.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/16/2020

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-sixth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In my 20s, my go-to cookbook for impressing dates (and far more often, let's be honest, cooking for one) was "The Silver Palate Cookbook'' by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins. Rosso and Lukins actually had a whole series of cookbooks, and I had a bunch of them. Every recipe was a winner.

But then the two women had a falling out, and each went on to write solo cookbooks, one of which was Lukins' "USA Cookbook," a collection of regional American dishes. I picked that one up in 1997 and tried to make the jambalaya recipe, which, as Lukins reported in the recipe's introduction, had been "graciously shared" with her by the chef at La Tasha's restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina.

One of the ingredients listed for the jambalaya reads as follows: "2 chickens (2 to 2½ pounds each), each cut into 8 pieces, rinsed, and patted dry."

I puzzled over that particular ingredient for some time. Two whole chickens? Eight random pieces? Or were you supposed to divide each chicken into wing, wing, thigh, thigh, breast, breast... wait, what else?

But even more pressing, there was no mention in that ingredient description of de-boning the chicken, and nothing in the recipe instructions about removing the meat from the bone at any point during the process. Was the jambalaya supposed to have chicken bones in it? That didn't seem right. But why didn't the recipe mention anything about this? This seemed like a crucial piece of information.

I struggled with what to do. Finally, I called information and asked for the number for La Tasha's restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, and then I called the restaurant.

[For the remainder of this story, I'll ask you to imagine that I'm telling it to you in person, adopting a ludicrously thick southern accent for one of the voices on the phone call.]

[insert accent here] "La Tasha's."

"Yeah, uh, I was wondering, uh... does your jambalaya have bones in it?"

If astonished incredulity could be conveyed in a single word, it was conveyed when the person replied, "Whaaaa?"

"Yeah, I said... uh... does your jambalaya have bones in it?"

"Naw, they ain't no bones in jambalaya!"

"Okay, thanks!" I said, and hung up. I didn't bother to ask what sort of pieces the chicken was divided up into. I figured I could wing that part.

So, I went ahead and made the jambalaya, boneless, and truth be told, it wasn't all that good. I never did try any of the other recipes in that particular cookbook. Maybe I should have sought out Rosso's solo efforts instead.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/18/2020

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-seventh episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I tend to favor loose-fitting clothing and jackets, and I'm forever getting snagged on furniture, door frames, staircase railings, etc. I'll be walking along, and suddenly the pocket of my sweatshirt will somehow latch itself onto a doorknob or a banister or something, and I'll be brought up short, or my shirt will rip, or both. If there's a nail jutting out of a wall I'm walking past, nine times out of ten, I'm going to get hooked on that nail, especially if I'm in a hurry.

A while back, I met up with a woman I had briefly dated in college, about fifteen years after I'd last seen her, and one of the first things she said to me was, "Do you still get snagged on things all the time?"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/20/2020

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-eighth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I lived with Chad Anderson, I had a couple of habits that drove him nuts. Like this one, which he still talks about, nearly thirty years later: We'd be at a store and I'd buy myself a couple of candy bars (e.g. some Twix) and squirrel them away somewhere (e.g. in the arm of my shirt... so, somebody might say that I had a few Twix up my sleeve; I mean, I wouldn't say that, but somebody might). Then, later that same day, late in the evening maybe, I'd pull out a candy bar and start eating it. That would make Chad want a candy bar, but he wouldn't have one, because he hadn't bought himself a candy bar for later when we were at the store.

Another thing I'd sometimes do that bugged Chad was brush my teeth early in the evening if I knew I wasn't going to eat anything else that day (e.g. any day I didn't have secret candy stashed away somewhere). So we'd be watching TV, and then as soon as Letterman signed off, I'd stand up and head towards my bedroom.

"Aren't you going to brush your teeth?" Chad would ask.

"I already did."

"Goddamnit, Greg!"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/22/2020

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-ninth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

For my job, I have 39 different log-in credentials (i.e. usernames/passwords) for various sites and systems, all with different password requirements, and all with varying schedules by which they must be changed.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/24/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fortieth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I have a recurring dream in which I can hover a few inches off the ground as long as I keep moving forward. I'll be walking with a group of people, and I'll jump up into the air, and I won't come back down again. I'll just move along with the group, floating a few inches off the ground. Nobody ever notices that I'm doing anything out of the ordinary.

I'm not sure exactly how, but I've always felt like this dream might be a metaphor for my entire life.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/26/2020

Hello, and welcome to the forty-first episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I worked for HBO Studio Productions in New York, I once took a call for my boss, who was away from her desk. In those days, I wasn't particularly diligent about asking probing questions of callers or taking down detailed messages. I'd just get the name and number and call it good. This particular caller (who was very nice) didn't volunteer any details; he just gave me his number and asked if my boss could call him back. "My name is Fred Rogers," he said, and the words "Like Mr. Rogers," were working their way up my throat towards my mouth, when I realized with a sudden crushing certainty that this WAS Mr. Rogers, so I simply thanked him and hung up.

Later, after my boss returned his call, she came out to my desk and said, "Do you know who that was?"

"It was Mr. Rogers," I said.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she said.

"His name's on the message slip," I said.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/28/2020

Hello, and welcome to the forty-second episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In a previous episode, I recounted my run-in with the law while assisting Matt Warren with a video project. Later, for another video assignment, Matt again solicited my assistance, this time devising a surreal nightmare scenario in which I would make out with a mannequin and then get chased down a hallway by a man (played by Jeff McMahan) wearing a walrus mask.

During the shooting of my mannequin makeout session, Matt became so disgusted he had to stop tape and collect himself, lest he throw up. I didn't know then (and still don't) whether I should have been insulted, if it was the mannequin or simply the sight of me kissing that had so repulsed him.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/30/2020

Hello, and welcome to the forty-third episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My elementary school art teacher was Lou Lorenzen, whom we were instructed to call Mr. Lou. Mr. Lou was an eccentric fellow. He liked to sit at the front of the classroom, smoking a pipe and singing silly songs and spouting historical trivia while the students worked on their art. He had a temper too, which would flare up if a kid complained or gave him a hard time about anything.

One day, he was talking about colonial times for some reason, and he mentioned the profession of cooper. "Does anyone know what a cooper is?" he said.

"I do!" I said. I knew because my family was supposedly descended from John Alden, a cooper who had come over on the Mayflower. (It turned out we weren't.)

"Not you," said Mr. Lou.

"A barrel-maker," I said, because I absolutely couldn't resist.

Mr. Lou was enraged. "I told you not to answer!" he shouted at me. "Just for that you have to stay after school."

I was horrified. I'd never been in trouble at school before, and the thought of staying after school filled me with terror and shame. I stewed about it for the rest of the day, and when the final bell rang, I decided just to go home.

"Aren't you supposed to stay after school?" one of my classmates helpfully reminded me as I left the building.

"I think Mr. Lou was just kidding," I suggested.

Maybe he was. Mr. Lou never brought it up again, and neither did I.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/2/2020

Hello, and welcome to the forty-fourth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

The Dalai Lama came to speak at my college, inexplicably booked into the smallest auditorium on campus, the theater normally used to screen film classics on Friday nights. The place was packed to overflowing, every seat taken, all the aisles crammed with people sitting elbows-in, hands on knees, and even the stage upon which the Dalai Lama would stand sardined with people, all sitting on the floor cross-legged, shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting to hear what the Dalai Lama had to say. Nowhere in the entire place was there an inch of floorspace visible. If a fire had broken out in the building that day, they almost surely would have had to select a new Dalai Lama.

Matt Warren and I had great seats, about three-quarters of the way back from the stage, in the exact middle of the row. A few minutes into the Dalai Lama's speech, a woman sitting directly in front of us spotted an acquaintance sitting on the stage, close enough to the Dalai Lama to be brushing against his robe. The woman in front of us vigorously waved to her friend, as if she had spotted a pal at a cocktail party. Matt and I turned to each other in astonishment and then burst into helpless, hysterical laughter, to the furious dismay of those sitting around us. We tried desperately to contain ourselves, which only made things worse. The guy sitting next to Matt (a friend of his) hadn't seen the woman wave and had no idea what we were laughing about, but he was soon laughing right along with us, which only infuriated our rowmates even further. We would have left, but the place was so packed with people, it was impossible to move, so we just had to power through the best we could. We'd get ourselves under control, and then one of us would start guffawing and then we'd be off again. It was excruciating.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/4/2020

Hello, and welcome to the forty-fifth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Once, when I was about ten years old, my mother pulled up directly in front of a convenience store and sent me in with some money to buy a loaf of bread. When I got in the store, I realized I had forgotten what she had asked me to get. I could remember only the cadence of it: a... something of... something. But a... what of... what?

I came out of the store with a head of lettuce, pretty sure I had nailed it.

And yes, many of you will undoubtedly be reminded of that old "Sesame Street" segment, and feel inspired (if not downright compelled) to go look it up.

Here, let me save you the trouble

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/6/2020

Hello, and welcome to the forty-sixth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

If the recipe calls for cornstarch, I'm going to be getting cornstarch everywhere—all over the counter, all over the floor, and all over myself. Especially all over myself: my shirt, my pants, my shoes; I'll just be covered with the stuff. And it doesn't matter how much or how little cornstarch the recipe calls for, it really doesn't. Half a teaspoon or a cup and a half, I'm going to be covered in cornstarch, head to toe, every time.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/8/2020

Hello, and welcome to the forty-seventh episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Many of you know that in the summer of 1991, I worked on the crew of a movie called "Time Chasers," which was famously skewered on "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

Look: Here's a 14-second snippet of me getting punched in the face by the hero:

Here's that same moment, filtered through those wiseacres at MST3K:

Here it is again, this time being skewered by the jokers at MST3K-offshoot RiffTrax Live:

And yes, here's that same moment yet again, captured the official "Time Chasers" coloring book:

So, I guess what I'm saying is: Yeah, I'm kind of a big deal.

Okay, what you might not know is that we filmed that particular stunt 10 to 15 times. That's 10 to 15 fake punches in the face and 10 to 15 very real falls backwards onto a cement floor. Around take five, my right arm started bleeding pretty badly, staining up my GenCorp uniform (of which there were a limited number). Out of desperation, one of the women on the crew got a maxipad out of her purse and taped it to my arm. Later, I lobbied to be credited as "man with maxipad on his arm," but this was ignored.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/10/2020

Hello, and welcome to the forty-eighth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One of the meanest things I've ever done (deliberately) was to write the following teacher evaluation for my least favorite college professor:

Woody Allen said, "Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym." [professor's first name], buy a whistle.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/12/2020

Hello, and welcome to the forty-ninth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

The 1977 young adult novel I Am the Cheese was written by Robert Cormier, who lived one town over from me, which I thought was unbelievably cool.

The novel opens with the protagonist (Adam) riding a bike down Mechanic Street in the fictional town of Monument, Massachusetts, past a hospital, high up on a hill to his right. Monument is fictional, but Mechanic Street and the hospital are real, and I knew exactly where they were, which was also unbelievably cool.

In the novel, Adam has a love interest named Amy. I heard a rumor somewhere that Amy's phone number in the novel was actually Robert Cormier's phone number in real life, so I called it, and it really was Robert Cormier's phone number in real life, and I talked to him for about fifteen minutes. I was eleven years old. I told him that I liked his book and that I wanted to be a writer myself. He couldn't have been more gracious and kind.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/14/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fiftieth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This might be hard to believe now, but when I was writing the very first "Greg Tulonen Secrets" post, it didn't even occur to me that there might be a second one.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/16/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fifty-first episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My high school social studies teacher once asserted that no U.S. president had ever been impeached. This was before President Clinton's impeachment, of course, and long before President Trump's impeachment (obviously), but it was certainly NOT before President Johnson's impeachment, so I felt compelled to correct him.

"Well, actually..." I began.

"No, no, no!" he interrupted. "Nixon resigned before he could be impeached!"

"I'm not talking about Nixon," I said. "I'm talking about Andrew Johnson."

"The Senate acquitted Johnson!" he shouted, quite agitated now.

"Yeah," I said, "right after the House impeached him."

"No! No! No!" He turned to the rest of the class, loudly declaring, his voice drenched with scorn, "Just so everybody knows: Greg is wrong!"

So, the next day, I brought an encyclopedia to class that explicitly confirmed that Johnson had been impeached.

"You see how it says he was acquitted in the Senate?" he said.

"You see how it says he was impeached in the House?" I said.

"So, we were both right," he said.

"Well, except you," I said.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/18/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fifty-second episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Senior year of college, American Literature majors (such as myself) were required to take a one-hour oral examination on all of American literature. I was terrified by the very thought of this exam, as it suddenly seemed to me that I hadn't done any of the required reading over the previous four years, or if I had, I couldn't remember any of it.

On the day of the test, I was sitting outside the American Literature offices, on a bench next to my friend Katherine Stebbins, both of us waiting to be called into our respective exam rooms. I was a mess, nervous and fretful and sure I was about to walk into a humiliating ritual evisceration, but Katherine seemed relatively unconcerned.

A professor happened by, one whom I hadn't exactly clicked with during my time with the department. (On one paper of mine, he had written, "The mediocrity of your ideas is at odds with the loveliness of your prose," which is sort of a compliment, I guess.) This professor stopped and enthusiastically greeted Katherine. "Are you waiting to take your exam?" he asked her, adding: "I know you're going to do great!" and then: "I'm sure you'll dazzle them!" and then: "What a pleasure it's been having you here!" and on and on along those lines (all of it deserved; Katherine's a rock star).

After several minutes of gushing, he turned to me and said, without warmth, "Hello," and then he turned and walked away.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/20/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fifty-third episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I am violently, catastrophically allergic to baked ham, but I experience no ill effects from eating pork, bacon, or sausage.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/22/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fifty-fourth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This is the story about the most frightened I have ever been in my life. It's also my earliest memory. I was three years old, and my parents were working at a summer camp in New Hampshire. Afternoons, my babysitter was a young woman named Debbie Pye. One day, after putting me down for a nap, Debbie Pye had a headache, so she went to the camp infirmary, then forgot to come back. My parents next saw her at dinner, when she showed up at the dining hall without me in tow.

I remember waking up that afternoon and climbing out of bed. A quick search of the cabin revealed that no one else was there. I had never been alone before, and I had no idea what to do. I got back into bed and waited for someone to return.

I lay there for a long time, and the sound of the cabin's screen door creaking slowly open in the breeze and then slamming shut, over and over again, sounded exactly like a monster trying to break in. At some point I started screaming.

I don't know how long this went on, but it felt like hours before my mom burst in and scooped me up in her arms. I couldn't stop sobbing. My memory then jump-cuts ahead about fifteen minutes to me sitting at a dining hall table for dinner, still gulping in ragged breaths, but shakily happy to be back with my parents.

I don't think Debbie Pye ever baby-sat for me again.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/24/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fifty-fifth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Barry Dodd told me he's been hoping for a secret about Ragged Isle, the web series we made a while back with Karen Dodd, Rick Dalton, Jacob Lear, and far too many (fabulous) cast and crew to tag here in this post. (If you haven't seen it but are curious, head on over to raggedisle.com to check it out.)

The truth is, I don't have that many secrets left regarding that show. Back when it was first airing (almost ten years ago now; holy cow!), I blogged pretty extensively after most episodes dropped, and that's when I spilled my behind-the-scenes backstories.

But I guess I do still have one or two little tidbits up my sleeve. Like this one:

One plot point running through all three seasons had resident psychic Madame Clelia (Kathryn Coccyx) giving seemingly random gifts to people who came to see her—a locket to Vicki, a key to Sheriff Dalton, a knife to Dr. Hoffman of the Maine CDC (played by me!). The significance and purpose of those gifts wouldn't become apparent until the final episodes.

Only, as originally scripted, the gift Dr. Hoffman received wasn't a knife. It was a marble. Said marble would come into play when a certain villain attacked Hoffman, dislodging the marble from his pocket, at which point it would roll along the floor, all marble-like, leading directly and comically to the villain's Rube Goldberg-esque demise.

Late in the scripting process, Barry told me he wanted the gift to be a knife, not a marble. I fought this long and hard. The gifts should all be seemingly innocuous, I argued. A knife is (or can be) a deadly weapon. Its use and purpose are obvious. The marble's use and purpose would come as a huge surprise to the audience. It had to be a marble!

Barry listened to all of my arguments, as he always does, and then said he wanted the gift to be a knife, not a marble. So that's what I wrote, with the knife's significance taking a few surprising twists and turns even after Dr. Hoffman uses it. And I have to say, the way Barry shot it and put it all together, it worked like gangbusters. (Actually, I have no idea how Barry would have shot that marble sequence.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/26/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fifty-sixth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the summer of 1985, I worked on the kitchen crew at a summer camp in Poland, Maine. The dining hall was an enormous log cabin, and one of my jobs was to clean the bat guano off of all the dining tables every morning. I can tell you this: there was A LOT of bat poop on every table, every single morning.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/28/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fifty-seventh episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the '90s, I worked a couple of blocks from Jen Hart's apartment. She wasn't in her apartment during the day, because back then, we all went into offices to do our work, but she didn't mind if I hung out there during my lunch hour.

One day, I was just sitting around her apartment when the phone rang. I didn't answer it, as I figured it wasn't for me, but I did hear the message that was left, because back then, people had answering machines instead of voicemail.

As soon as the person calling had hung up, Jen's cat Maida ran over to the answering machine and pressed the "Play" button with her paw. I heard the message that had just been left play over again, followed by a computerized voice that advised, "To save this message, press 'Save.'" I wasn't quick enough, and Maida did nothing at all, so the message was promptly deleted.

I had to wonder if that had happened more than once.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/30/2020

Hello, and welcome to the fifty-eighth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I worked at MassLive in Northampton, the parking lot was an unlined, disorganized free-for-all, far too small to accommodate everyone who worked in the building (a converted mill housing several companies). There was an ancillary parking lot a little further away, but nobody wanted to park there, so people just macaronied themselves into the main lot willy-nilly.

Often, you'd come out of work at the end of the day and find yourself blocked in by somebody who had created a parking space for himself directly behind you, and then you'd have to go back in and hunt around from office to office, hoping to find the offender.

The worst of the lot was a fellow with the personalized license plate "GODOT," who would park just any old place, no matter how many people it trapped. Waiting for GODOT to come move his car was like, well, waiting for Godot.

Fortunately for me, he always kept his car door unlocked, and it was a stick shift, so any time GODOT had me blocked in, I'd just put his car in neutral and push it over to some other place, doing my best not to block in anybody else in the process. (Sometimes, I had to move it a pretty good distance.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/1/2021

Hello, and welcome to the fifty-ninth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was in my 20s, before I had kids, I had a monumentally difficult time waking up. Every morning, for the first few seconds, or even minutes, of consciousness, it would be like being born, coming into the world and not knowing anything, like who I was or where I was, or even what words or numbers meant.

I'm not exaggerating. The symbols on my digital alarm clock might as well have been hieroglyphics. The only thing I could do to make sure I got up on time was to prop up a little note next to the alarm clock before I went to bed, with a written depiction of what the clock should look like when I had to get up. 6:30 or 7:00 or 8:15 or whatever.

Somehow, my just-awoken newborn baby brain knew enough to compare the symbols on the paper to the symbols on the clock, and to rally into cognizance when the symbols matched.

This was every single morning.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/3/2021

Hello, and welcome to the sixtieth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Many readers of this series have commented on my memory, as I have repeatedly recounted vivid and specific details from long-ago incidents. Even some of the people tagged in these posts have no recollection of the events described, though they do not doubt their veracity. And the truth is, I do have a very good memory, but it does sometimes fail me. I'll give you an example.

There's a musician I like a lot named Jonathan Richman, from a short-lived (but influential) '70s band called The Modern Lovers and a very long solo career that continues to this day. I've seen him in concert many times, sometimes with my friend Kate Culkin. I once gave Kate a homemade CD compilation of my favorite Jonathan Richman songs, featuring at least one song from every single one of his albums, including the bootlegs. Then I forgot all about it. Like, completely. Even now, I can't really remember making this CD, though I know I did. The playlist is still there in my iTunes, or whatever iTunes is called now.

One day, I was visiting Kate, and she put on the Jonathan Richman compilation I had made for her. It was playing in the background as we talked, and I subconsciously registered that Jonathan Richman was playing, but I didn't think too much about it, except to silently acknowledge that I liked the music. Finally, my subconscious elbowed its way into my regular conscious as I came to realize that this was a REALLY good Jonathan Richman album, featuring all of my favorite Jonathan Richman songs.

"What album is this?" I asked Kate. I wasn't aware that such a comprehensive Jonathan Richman compilation had ever been released.

"Uh, this is the CD you made for me," said Kate, looking a bit puzzled.

"Oh," I said, feeling a bit foolish.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/5/2021

Hello, and welcome to the sixty-first episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the summer of 1994, Matt Warren briefly visited me in New York City, accompanied by a friend I had never met before (and never saw again). During the visit, we got to talking about "NYPD Blue," which had recently completed its first season, becoming a monster hit for ABC and making a television super-star out of David Caruso. Matt's friend said that he'd heard Caruso would be leaving the show, to be replaced by Jimmy Smits.

At the time, I considered myself pretty well read on contemporary popular culture, but I hadn't come across that particular item, and it sounded like nonsense. Caruso surely wouldn't leave a show that had so recently launched him to mega-fame, and ABC surely wouldn't let him go. It seemed like the kind of false flag rumor that would be deliberately spread by a television network negotiating with an actor who was holding out for more money.

"I guarantee you that will never happen," I said with confidence, or maybe even outright condescension, if I'm being completely honest.

It's been almost thirty years since that conversation, but I still sometimes think about that guy, Matt's friend, and how his only impression of me (if he remembers me at all) is that time I was spectacularly wrong about David Caruso and "NYPD Blue."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/7/2021

Hello, and welcome to the sixty-second episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Today's secret arrives in the form of a very important video message about this series.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/8/2021

Hello, and welcome to the sixty-third episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My friend Chad Anderson does NOT like the idea of ghosts. He doesn't want to see one. He doesn't want to hear one. He doesn't want to encounter one in any way. So naturally, I once asked him if I died before he did, would he be okay with a light haunting?

"You better not, Tulonen!" he admonished.

"What if it's something small, like I turn on the light in your kitchen while you're asleep?"

"No!"

"Or I could just lightly tap on the window when you're in the bathroom, you know, just to say hello."

"You better not!"

"How about this: You're eating pancakes, and I write a little message in syrup on your plate, like, 'These are the pancakes of the devil'?"¹

Chad: "Aaaaaagh!"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Editor's note: Something like this, I imagine:

1/9/2021

Hello, and welcome to the sixty-fourth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once peed next to Hulk Hogan in a men's room in HBO Studio Productions in NYC. There were little metal partitions between the urinals for privacy, but he towered over the one between us.

(When I tell this story in person, I usually add that he glanced down at me and said, "Good for you!" but that part's not true.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/10/2021

Hello, and welcome to the sixty-fifth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This is really my dad's secret, but he's not around anymore, so I'm going to share it. (I do have a cameo.)

When I was born, my parents were friends with a couple named Steve and Lisa (not their real names). Steve and Lisa thought I was the cutest baby they'd ever seen. They went on and on about it. "Greg is so cute!" they'd exclaim, every time they saw me. "He's the cutest baby!" Every time. It got to be ridiculous. It got to be annoying. So much so, that my dad vowed to my mom, "When they have a baby of their own, I'm gonna tell them it's the ugliest baby I've ever seen."

Sure enough, when Steve and Lisa had a baby of their own, my dad rushed to their house with my mom, eager to share his bon mot. Steve and Lisa's entire family was there to see the baby—parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins. My dad elbowed his way past all of them so he could lay eyes on the newborn.

"That's the ugliest baby I've ever seen!" he shouted, and a ghastly silence fell upon the room. My dad looked down and was shocked by what he saw.

Steve and Lisa's child truly was the ugliest baby he had ever seen.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/11/2021

Hello, and welcome to the sixty-sixth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was 6 or 7 years old, I spent the night at my grandparents' house. It was a school night, and in the morning I got up pretty early, went downstairs, and saw a pristine, freshly made birthday cake on the counter that my Nana had made for one of her students. Nana was upstairs, getting ready for work, so I called up to her: "Nana, can I have something to eat?"

Okay. Let me stop the story right there to fully acknowledge that this was—quite deliberately—a somewhat vaguely worded request. (I was young, but I was crafty.)

Nana called down to me, saying (and I quote verbatim): "You can have anything your little heart desires."

Bingo. This was exactly the response I was looking for, because it just so happened that my little heart desired a piece of birthday cake, and as far as I was concerned, I'd been given the green light, so I cut myself a corner piece.

My aunt Patty saw me eating the cake. (Actually, I deliberately went up to Patty's room to eat it in front of her, to show off my accomplishment.) She told me she didn't think I was supposed to be eating that, but I assured her I was. "Nana told me I could have anything my little heart desires."

Well, believe it or not, as it turns out, I WASN'T supposed to be eating that birthday cake, but when Nana found out, she wasn't even a little bit mad. I had her on a technicality, you see. A loophole. (Also, I was her grandson.) She just lopped off one end of the cake from the corner I had cut out and frosted the new edge. (I guess it's lucky it wasn't a circular cake.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/12/2021

Hello, and welcome to the sixty-seventh episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the old days, before curbside pickup and grocery shopping apps, it was a fairly common grocery store occurrence for me to forget to pick up an item or two that I'd intended to purchase. Even if I only had two or three things to get, I would almost always walk out of the store without at least one of the items I'd walked into the store to retrieve.¹

Consequently, I tried to make sure I always had a shopping list with me when I went to the grocery store. Sometimes, however,I had a little trouble holding onto my list. This is a story about one of those times.

A dozen or so years ago, I went out for three or four items. Before I left home, I made myself a list and put it in my pocket. When I got to the store, I selected a couple of items from memory, then dug into my pocket so I could cross-check against my list.

The list wasn't there.

I checked my pocket again. I checked my other pocket. I checked my back pockets. I checked my coat pockets (there were nine; I like coats with lots of pockets). I found several lists from previous shopping excursions, but not the one I had just composed.

I went out to my car and checked all around inside. No list. I walked back to the store and stood by a trash can, ridding my pockets of all those other stray lists. I checked my pockets one last time, turning them all inside-out to confirm their emptiness. They were all empty.

I didn't have a cell phone yet, so I couldn't call Kate to see if she could remember everything that had been on the list (which, you'll recall, was only three or four items long). So I went back into the store and got everything I could remember, of course forgetting one thing (pineapple tidbits). When I got home, I told Kate all about it, putting my hand in my pocket to demonstrate what had happened, and the list was there.

Now, quantum mechanics and the many worlds theory postulate that it is possible for an object to simultaneously exist in two different states: a radioactive atom decays and does not decay; Schrödinger's cat is killed and is not killed; a grocery list is in my pocket and is not in my pocket. So, maybe that's what was going on. Maybe I got caught in a quantum cascade, creating a small continuity error in my reality. But of course, the more persuasive explanation is that I'm just a jackass, which would be the explanation I'd be inclined to believe, except for one thing:

The list wasn't there, damn it!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Recall secret #45, in which I bought a head of lettuce rather than the intended loaf of bread; this was a long-standing problem.

1/13/21

Hello, and welcome to the sixty-eighth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Once, in college, my friend Jeff McMahan and I saw a bearded lady hanging out by the library. (That's a significant thing for me to acknowledge, for reasons that will soon become apparent.) This was well before there was much mainstream acceptance or visibility of non-traditional gender representation. Not that we gawked or jeered or anything; it was just sort of an unusual sight to see for a couple of cis white guys in rural Vermont in the late '80s or early '90s.

Later, when Jeff mentioned to our friends that we had seen a bearded lady earlier that day, I denied it. "What are you talking about?" I said, my brow furrowed in puzzlement. This vexed Jeff somewhat, so I continued to deny it until, well, this very moment. Even if there was no one else around, it was just Jeff and me talking, I would claim to have no knowledge of ever having seen any bearded lady with him. This drove Jeff crazy, and amused me no end.

When this Secrets project began a few months back, Jeff asked me if it meant I would finally admit to having seen a bearded lady with him that day. "What bearded lady?" I said (of course).

Jeff's birthday is coming up in a few days, so here you go, my friend. Happy (early) birthday. At last, a truth acknowledged.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/14/2021

Hello, and welcome to the sixty-ninth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once got lost in New Jersey. This was before cell phones and Google maps, so I stopped at a police station to ask directions. The main entrance to the station was at the front of the building, but the parking lot was around back, so after I parked, rather than walk all the way around the building to go in, I just went in through a rear door, figuring there would be some signage or something that would point me towards some sort of reception area.

There wasn't.

I walked around for a little while, down unmarked hallways, trying various doors to see where they led. The first unlocked door I tried opened into a small room in which a young, forlorn-looking woman sat across a bare table from an older man wearing a cheap sports coat and tie—a scene recognizable to anyone who's ever seen a cop show as a police interrogation.

The man turned to me in irritation and said, "Can I help you?"

"Uh, yeah, can you tell me how to get to Division Avenue?"

"What?" This was more an expression of incredulity than a request for repetition, but I repeated myself anyway.

"Yeah, I'm just trying to find, uh, Division Avenue?"

"Ask at reception! I'm in the middle of something here!"

"Sure, okay," I said. "Sorry. Could you just... uh... tell me how to find reception?"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/15/2021

Hello, and welcome to the seventieth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Junior year in college, Chad Anderson and I had papers due the next day (in different classes) that we were unable or unwilling to complete on time. Now, it's pretty much the easiest thing in the world to get an extension on a paper, but we were both mortified at the prospect of calling our professors and asking for one. After fretting about it for a good length of time, we realized that neither of us had a problem making the call on the other guy's behalf.

So, I called Chad's professor, pretending to be Chad, and got the extension with no problem at all. Then Chad called my professor and told him he was a friend of mine and that I was really sick and had had to go into the infirmary to get checked out, but before I went, I had asked Chad to call my professor to request an extension. (In retrospect, that story seems needlessly convoluted to me now, but I think Chad was uncomfortable pretending to be me.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/16/2021

Hello, and welcome to the seventy-first episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

As some of you know, my screenplay, Derrick and Boyd, won the 2019 Sanford Independent Film Festival Script-to-Screen competition. (In fact, I met some of you fine folks at the awards ceremony; some of you participated in the table read. It was a fun night.) The screenplay was shot under pandemic restrictions last October, with James Harmon producing and Chris Goodwin directing. By all accounts, it was a terrific shoot, and I hope to have information about the finished film sometime this year. Personally, I can't wait to see it.

Now, what most of you likely do not know is that another screenplay of mine, How Grandma Met the Rat Pack, was nominated for the 2020 SIFF Script-to-Screen competition. The status of that one is currently in limbo, because SIFF 2020 was postponed indefinitely due to COVID, and it's not entirely clear if and when SIFF 2020 is going to happen, but in any case, How Grandma Met the Rat Pack has been good luck for me in different formats. The short story version won a fiction competition in 2005, and the stage play version was selected and staged for a playwriting festival in 2020.

All three versions contain the following line, a line that literally came to me in a dream in the early '00s:

"Grandma's handwriting is so bad, to this day we don't know if Grampy was killed by a bus or a bear."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

UPDATE: Derrick and Boyd can now be found here, and How Grandma Met the Rat Pack can now be found here.

1/17/2021

Hello, and welcome to the seventy-second and final episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

During the 1988 Christmas season, students at the high school my mom taught at were selling "peppermint poles," oversized peppermint sticks about ten inches long and two inches thick.

Now, nothing against my mom's students. I'm sure they were a swell bunch of kids, and I certainly hope they achieved whatever monetary goal they set for themselves with the peppermint pole campaign. But really, doesn't the whole peppermint pole concept seem like the most awful idea ever (besides, you know, things like genocide or storming the US Capitol)? I mean, what are you supposed to do with a peppermint pole? Consume it? If you travel down that road, what are you supposed to do after about 15 minutes of licking? (Also: aren't you sorry that image is now in your head?) Now you've got a giant, sticky, hard candy in your hand that you can't set down anywhere without getting lint and dust and other crap all over it. You could put it in a plastic bag, but do you really want to take it out of the bag someday and lick it some more? Do you?

Here's what I did with mine. (No, I didn't contribute to the fundraising campaign. My mom gave me one of those bad boys for Christmas, among other presents.) A few weeks after Christmas, my mom turned 40. This was my sophomore year in college. I decided to travel back home and present her with 40 individually wrapped gifts. Some of these gifts (in fact, quite a few of them) were quite modest (a candy bar, an ice scraper, etc.), and one of them was the peppermint pole, re-gifted. "Uh oh," my mom said just before she unwrapped it. "Why do I think I've seen this one before?"

When I got back to college, I discovered that my mom had stowed the peppermint pole in my suitcase.

And so began a years-long back and forth. I would visit my mom and leave the peppermint pole in her medicine cabinet. She'd visit me and leave it in a shoe. Back and forth, back and forth, the pole becoming grungier and grungier over the years. At one point it broke in half and had to be duct-taped.

Then, one day in 1999, my mom received a package in the mail. I wish I had a photograph of the package, but believe me when I tell you that it looked like an extremely professional mailing: a small box sealed with glue, not tape, like something you'd get from L.L. Bean or the Book of the Month Club. Affixed to the outside of the package was a windowed envelope with my mom's name and address displayed through the window. The surface of the envelope bore the words, in big red letters, "OPEN ME FIRST!" My mom, being the obedient person she is, opened the envelope first and read the enclosed letter, which looked like this:

Her curiosity piqued, my mom tore open the package, dug through the styrofoam peanuts contained therein, and discovered the peppermint pole—at which point she burst out laughing right there in the post office. I wish I could have been there. My mom has a great laugh.

(Upon closer inspection, the letter yielded some clues that we'll get to in just a second, but I should also add that I had asked Kate to sign it in case my mother recognized my handwriting, if only subliminally. I had also asked Kate to take it to another town and mail it, lest a prominent postmark give the game away. Kate was a good sport, I have to say.)

Later that day, I received the following message on my answering machine: "All I can say is, I bow to greatness."

Okay, let's take another look at that letter, annotated this time to point out the clues I had embedded:

That was the last I ever saw of the peppermint pole. My mom swears to this day that she tossed it in a dumpster when she was doing a major home cleanout. And she probably did, but maybe, just maybe, it's still out there somewhere, like a peppermint pole of Damocles hanging over my head for two decades and counting.

Maybe my mom gets the last laugh after all.

It's my mom's seventy-second birthday today, so this right here, the seventy-second secret, is for her. Happy birthday, Mom!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

1/17/2022

Hello, and welcome to the seventy-third episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets," which returns today for a second season.

I will now describe the best practical joke I ever devised, and the crushingly disappointing reaction it elicited.

But first, some backstory: For my twenty-first birthday, my father gifted me with his car, since he was getting another one for himself.¹ His presentation of this gift is a whole other story, which might be the subject of a future Greg Tulonen Secret², but today, the story I'm thinking of involves a road trip I took in that car with my roommate, Matt Warren, our senior year of college.

For my on-campus job with the film department, I was asked to pick up a visiting professor at the Hartford airport and drive him back to Vermont. Matt latched onto this task in the hopes of also picking up his friend Frank Dill in New Haven and driving him up for a visit. I agreed to this plan, but the job part soon fell away because the visiting professor had arranged his own transportation (probably because he didn't relish the idea of a long car trip with a couple of college kids).

Since the Frank Dill plan was already in place, we decided to go through with the trip anyway. This decision proved stressful and costly to me, as it resulted in a speeding ticket I couldn't afford, and a strange, expensive side quest into Manhattan to the comedy club Dangerfield's, where we saw some truly awful comedians perform. (After one bizarrely hapless comic, Matt remarked, "Great act. Wrong planet.")

Okay, we're coming up on my prank now. On the way back to Vermont, Matt drove, Frank sat in the passenger seat, and I sat in the back. When it got dark, I took advantage of a feature of the car that Matt and Frank were unaware of. You see, you could access the trunk from the back seat. So, very slowly and very quietly, I eased my seat down, and even more slowly and more quietly, I crawled into the trunk and eased the seat back into place. I managed to do all this without Matt or Frank noticing. (You may doubt this, but I am certain.) Then I waited for them to realize I was gone, fully expecting a baffled freakout.

Quite a bit of time went by, and then it started snowing. Matt called back to me, asking something about how the windshield wipers worked, and I didn't respond. "This is it," I thought, swelling with anticipation and glee. Frank glanced back and remarked (with neither interest nor concern), "He's not there." By then, Matt had figured out the windshield wipers, and he made no comment on Frank's observation.

Folks, I'm here to tell you that there is no lonelier feeling in the world than hiding in the trunk of a car driven by people, friends even, who seemingly care little (or not at all) about your mysterious absence. I lay there for a while, contemplating my insignificance, until I sheepishly crawled back into my seat.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹This would be his minivan, first mentioned in GTS #8.

²Editor's note: It was.

1/19/2022

Hello, and welcome to the seventy-fourth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Here is my confession: Superglue doesn't work for me. It has never worked for me, except as a method of sticking my forefinger to my thumb. Do you remember those old commercials from the '80s, where the guy krazy-glues his hard hat to an "I" beam and then dangles from it, his feet kicking wildly? If that had been me, I would have died, because superglue doesn't work for me. Every time I've ever tried to stick two pieces of a broken thing together with superglue, matching up the edges perfectly and holding them together for two minutes after applying the glue, they've immediately fallen apart again as soon as I let go. Every single time. I feel like superglue is an elaborate practical joke the entire world is playing on me. It just doesn't work.

Now, hot glue guns, on the other hand, work for me like gangbusters.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/21/2022

Hello, and welcome to the seventy-fifth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I was valedictorian of my high school class. (That's not a brag; it's just backstory.) In Montana at the time (and maybe still, for all I know), all the valedictorians in the state appeared in TV commercial spots in cap and gown, walking one by one across fields of green. I have no idea why this was done, and I've never actually seen my own spot. I'm sure it was great.

The commercial shoot took place in Helena, the state capital, a couple hours' drive from our town. My mother (Joanne Tulonen) and I both have a chronic fear of being late, so we allowed ourselves plenty of time to get there. This was before MapQuest or GPS or any other sort of electronic navigational assistance, but this was no problem. My mother is an intuitive driver with an innate sense of direction. She always finds her way.

Shortly after we arrived in the city, the intersection up ahead of us was blocked off to make way for a Shriners parade. No problem. We'd just turn around and find another way. We still had plenty of time. But as we were turning around, the street behind us was ALSO blocked off, and so were all the side streets. The parade, you see, was circling several city blocks, and we were smack-dab in the middle of it, cut off from the rest of the world by an unbroken ring of Montana Shriners.

Shriners hadn't been invented when Dante wrote about the nine circles of hell, but I'm here to tell you that if he had been with us that day, he would have added a tenth circle, populated exclusively by little old men in tasseled fezes, corralling the damned with their fancy little cars.

The minutes sped by, and the "plenty of time" we had allowed ourselves dwindled down to nothing. My commercial shoot call time came and went, and still the Shriners kept on driving in ceaseless circles around us. By now, my mother and I were frantically pacing the blocked-off street, trying to psychically will all those Shriners back to their Temples. It didn't work. They were having no end of fun, those Shriners, and there was no end in sight for us.

The end did come, eventually. The parade finished, the Shriners went home, the streets were unblocked, and we made our way to the shoot, very late. But that was okay, as it turned out. There were a lot of valedictorians to shoot, and they slotted me in just fine. All's well that ends well.

But I still have an irrational fear of Shriners.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/24/2022

Hello, and welcome to the seventy-sixth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

From the time they were very little, my younger child (who uses "they/them" pronouns) struggled with food allergies and intolerances. Even as a baby, when they would nurse after Kate had eaten something they were sensitive to, the child would suffer from severe stomach pain, digestive difficulty, blistering eczema, and sleepless nights (so many sleepless nights).

We sought guidance from various gastroenterologists, from Portland, Maine to Denver, Colorado, but no one could help us. Most allergy tests came back negative, and most doctors seemed to think that was the end of the story—no further action required. They were miserable. We were all miserable.

Thankfully, we eventually found a doctor at Boston Children's Hospital who has worked with us ever since, and even more thankfully, they have outgrown much of the food sensitivity they suffered from when they were younger. But for a long while there, there were only four safe foods they could eat: turkey, carrots, rice, and apples.

That was it. Turkey, carrots, rice, and apples. Everything I cooked for them had to be made with turkey, carrots, rice, and/or apples—and nothing else. I got fairly creative, crafting burgers out of grated apples and rice flour, and ice cream out rice milk and apple syrup. But nevertheless, it was a pretty monotonous diet. As far as the rest of the family was concerned, I could either make a simple, bland meal for all of us to eat, or I could make something more adventurous and not let our younger child have any. Neither choice was all that palatable.

Every few months, we could try another food to see how they reacted. So, in the first year of their restricted diet, we were able to add bananas and peas. Woo hoo!

One day, when they were three years old, Kate called me at work to tell me they were clamoring for Chicken McNuggets. Okay, there were just a couple of problems with that one, starting with the fact that they couldn't eat chicken. Still, I wondered if it would be possible to make turkey nuggets that would be safe for them.

So, that weekend, I concocted nuggets out of turkey breasts cut into squares, dipped in applesauce, coated in pea flour, and fried in rice oil. Having no idea how they would turn out, I only made a few for a late-morning snack, but they were a huge hit. My child told me over and over again how much they loved them. Their older brother had a couple, and immediately asked for more. As soon as the nuggets were gone, they demanded I make another batch. "Later," I told them. "We'll have them for dinner." Over the next several hours, they would occasionally shout (with increasing frequency as the day wore on) "More nuggets! More nuggets!" It sure felt nice to see the child truly excited about food, for maybe the first time ever.

So that evening, I made more turkey nuggets, following the exact same recipe. I called the kids to the dinner table and they came running. The older child took one bite, ran to the garbage can, and spit it out. "I don't want to eat these," he said. The younger child took one bite, started crying, and wailed, "I don't want these!"

I was flummoxed. "Guys," I said, "you loved them this morning. What's going on?" My older child didn't reply, but do you want to know what my younger child said to me? Keep in mind, they were three years old and the one who asked for a second helping of nuggets in the first place. This is what they said: "I was joking, Daddy! I was joking about liking them!"

I wish I could say I took this development in stride, shrugging it off and chalking it up to the fickleness of toddlers. But not so much. I went up to my bedroom to brood (some might say sulk), and let Kate figure out what to feed them.

By the way, my younger child is 16 now and has no memory of this incident, but when I told them about it the other day, they thought it was hilarious.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/26/2022

Hello, and welcome to the seventy-seventh episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Junior year in college, I got a CD player, which in 1989 was a big-deal upgrade from my cassette tape boombox. My friend Jeff McMahan was studying overseas that year, but he came back for a visit, and when he stepped into my dorm room, he immediately began inspecting my burgeoning CD collection, just as I knew he would. And just as I knew he would, he said, "Do you have any good CDs?"

I advised him to open the sealed envelope tucked between the last two CDs on the shelf. Inside that envelope was a single sheet of paper upon which were neatly printed the following words:

JEFF: Do you have any good CDs?
GREG: Ha ha fuck you.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/28/2022

Hello, and welcome to the seventy-eighth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My grandfather Carleton Finch is (like many people's grandfathers, I suspect) very particular about driving directions. No matter where you're going or where you've been, he has a definite opinion about the best route you should have taken to get there—factoring in actual miles, traffic conditions, and even the aesthetics of the landscape you would have been driving past. I've heard him argue with great energy and enthusiasm with his sons and daughters (and other concerned parties) over the optimal routes between various points A and points B, and he always gets the last word.

So when I had to drive from my grandparents' house in Massachusetts to New York, I asked him to write down the best way to get there, which he was more than happy to do. This was before GPS, but that hardly mattered with my grandfather on the case. His directions worked perfectly

A year or so later, I had occasion to drive from New York back to my grandparents' house in Massachusetts. Luckily, I still had those directions he had written down for me. All I had to do was reverse them, and they worked just as perfectly to get me from my point B to his point A.

When I arrived, my grandfather asked me what route I had taken. (OF COURSE he asked me what route I had taken.) I recited his long-ago directions (reversed) from memory. He paused for a moment, as if taken aback, and then said: "That's exactly the route you should have taken."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/31/2022

Hello, and welcome to the seventy-ninth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I get together with a bunch of college friends every Memorial Day weekend (global pandemics permitting). On one of these weekends—Memorial Day 2005, as it happens—event organizer Chad Anderson promised a special prize for anyone who showed up with Pabst Blue Ribbon. I've forgotten why. Was it a Blue Velvet reference? Or just a reference to good old fashioned Americana? I really don't remember. In any case, I showed up with the PBR, and the prize in question was a can of Hobo Soup. This very can of Hobo Soup, pictured here.

In case you were wondering, Hobo Soup is not soup made from hoboes, but rather soup that utilizes the bygone hobo archetype for its logo, as American as Pabst Blue Ribbon. (Hey, wait a minute...)

I held onto this prize for many years, long past the soup's 2007 expiration date, bringing it with me to each Memorial Day weekend gathering as sort of a talismanic mascot. Then, at the end of Memorial Day weekend 2016, as I was departing for home, and in a fit of Marie Kondo-esque cleansing, I discarded the can on my way out the door. The only witness to this act was my friend John Dahl, who expressed skepticism at the purge but made no move to stop me.

Another year went by, another Memorial Day weekend gathering. John Dahl wasn't able to attend in 2017, but when I got home from that weekend and unpacked, there was the can of Hobo Soup, secreted in my bag. I realized John Dahl must have retrieved it from the trash the previous year and then enlisted an accomplice to give it back to me the next year against my will.

After that, I figured it was my destiny to hang on to this can of Hobo Soup forever, and it still makes the trek with me every Memorial Day, turning up in group photos and on various counters and other surfaces throughout the weekend.

I still don't know who John Dahl's accomplice was in 2016/2017. You might say it's a Greg Tulonen Secret that's a secret... from myself.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/2/2022

Hello, and welcome to the eightieth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was a kid, I was curious if you could really influence people's dreams by whispering something in their ear, the way they sometimes do on television sitcoms. So I sneaked into my uncle David's room while he was sleeping and whispered in his ear, over and over (and over) again: "There's a mouse riding a bicycle in your bathtub."

(This image is swiped directly from Roger W. Drury's 1976 chapter book, "The Champion of Merrimack County," but I was pretty sure David hadn't read that.)

After several minutes of whispering, an audibly annoyed David groaned, "Would you knock it off!"

I knocked it off, the experiment an apparent failure. But I did check in with David later just to be sure, asking him if he'd had a dream about a mouse riding a bicycle in his bathtub.

He hadn't.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/4/2022

Hello, and welcome to the eighty-first episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

If you're old enough to remember when the movie "Philadelphia" came out, you probably remember how groundbreaking it was considered. It was one of the first mainstream Hollywood movies to have a big Hollywood star playing a gay protagonist, and one of the first to even acknowledge HIV/AIDS. Of course, as with any groundbreaking piece of popular culture, what once seemed daring can come to seem tame, or even regressive. But at the time of its release, "Philadelphia" was a big deal.

In any case, I had plans to see it with my friend James Appleby. I got there first, so I purchased tickets for both of us. But then James didn't show up, and he kept on not showing up right up until showtime. I approached the ticket counter and asked if I could get a refund, and was told no, but I was welcome to try to re-sell my tickets to late-arriving patrons.

The first guy to come up to the ticket window was agreeable enough to purchasing one of my tickets, but he only needed one. So, I explained my situation to the second guy, and asked him if he'd like to buy his ticket from me.

"For how much?" he wanted to know.

"Well, the ticket price," I assured him, assuming he thought I was trying to scalp (which would have been dumb; there were still tickets available).

"Ticket price?" He was incredulous. "I'll give you four bucks. How about that?"

"No thanks," I said. "I'll just wait for the next person."

"Four bucks!" he insisted, angry now. "It's better than nothing!"

"No thanks," I reminded him.

"Jeez, for a guy in a jam," he said, "you're being kinda choosy. I'm trying to help you out here!"

"Well, for a good Samaritan," I advised him, "you're being kind of an asshole."

That's when he shoved me up against the ticket counter and pressed his forearm up against my throat, knocking over a napkin dispenser and a stand-up display (and teaching me the important lesson that just because I think of something clever to say, that doesn't necessarily mean I should say it). "How would you like to suck my dick?" he sneered, his face inches from mine.

"I think you really need to see this movie," I said. (I didn't say I LEARNED that lesson.)

The theater manager came running over to break up the fracas. Of course the theater would buy back my ticket, the manager told me, once he found out what was going on, and my would-be good Samaritan stormed away, sullenly grumbling.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/7/2022

Hello, and welcome to the eighty-second episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once worked as a web producer for a television station in Portland, Maine. The powers that be decided to change website platforms, which meant that the station's website had to be rebuilt from the ground up. By me. The content management system (CMS) provided to me to accomplish this task was powerful, but required me to construct the site from the most basic elements (which I also had to construct). It was sort of like those elaborate Lego kits that so confounded me when my kids were little, except for the analogy to be completely accurate, I would be pouring the liquid plastic into molds to make the individual Lego bricks. All of which is to say that this was going to take an enormous amount of work. By me. I also had a hard and fast deadline of June 19, or our site would go dark. This was exactly two weeks from the day I was given the web tools to build the site.

In the middle of all this, my computer developed an ugly virus that caused it to crash every five minutes (and also to send out, all over the world, millions of spam emails from my computer, which briefly prevented my entire company from sending out emails).

Minutes after I discovered my computer had a virus, my boss wandered by. The following is a transcript of our conversation:

Boss: Hey Greg, how's it going?

Me (all in one breath because I'm seriously freaking out): Well I've got to get the new website done by June 19 which is way too little time to begin with and I just got a computer virus that causes my machine to shut down every five minutes and I don't know how I'm going to get this done!

[pause]

Boss: Huh. Hey, let me ask you something. Do you know how to build a website from scratch? 'Cause I've got a buddy who's starting up a business and he needs a website.

[long, long pause]

Me: Yeah, I don't think I can do that.

(Side note: That was a lie. I did know how to build a website from scratch. I built gregtulonen.com from scratch. But eff that guy. Seriously.)

I did manage to finish the site on time, staying very late—long after everyone else had gone home—on the June 19 target date, which was a Friday night that year (and also my birthday). On Monday, I sent out an all-staff email to let people know about the new site. A couple of hours later, my boss stopped by my office. Okay, I thought. He's here to tell me the new site looks awesome (which it did).

Except, no.

"Hey, Greg," he said. "My country club has this video on golf etiquette. They don't know how to display it on their website. Could you help them with that?"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/9/2022

Hello, and welcome to the eighty-third episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

For the past 31 years, most mornings I wake up blind in my right eye—like, completely blind, except maybe to distinguish darkness from light. After a few minutes of blinking and rubbing my eyelid, the vision is always restored (so far anyway), but if I've ever greeted you first thing in the morning with my right eye squeezed shut, that's why.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/11/2022

Hello, and welcome to the eighty-fourth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

On June 6, 1986, my mother and I were flying from Montana to Boston. We changed planes in Minneapolis, and were seated directly in front of a mom with her young kids. "Where's Daddy?" I heard one of the kids ask, mid-flight. "He's at work," said the mom. "Don't you remember, we saw him on TV last night?" Well, that got my attention. Who was the daddy? An actor? A newscaster? Sting?

When we arrived at Logan Airport, there was a large cluster of people at the gate, awaiting our flight's arrival (it was a different time, prior to 9/11). One figure towered above everyone else, like Goliath among the Philistines. The crowd parted around him as he stepped forward to greet his wife and children.

It was Kevin McHale.

This was the middle of the 1986 NBA Finals. The previous evening, the Celtics had fallen to the Rockets in Game 5, and Game 6 would be played in Boston two nights later (where the Celtics would prevail, winning the Championship).

In the airport, a few people wished McHale luck, but mostly everyone left him alone as he lifted his kids high into the air with his comically long arms.

(For me, the real mystery of this story is why Kevin McHale's family wasn't sitting in first class.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/14/2022

Hello, and welcome to the eighty-fifth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I have dropped acid exactly once in my life. I was three years old. My dad's college buddy was visiting. This fellow arrived with several tabs of mescaline secreted in his suitcase, and somehow, I got up before everybody else, got into that suitcase, and helped myself to one and a half tabs before I was discovered.

My parents were 23 and 25, terrified to call the police or take me to the hospital, so my dad, who taught high school English, called up one of his students, a drug dealer named Buffalo, and asked him for advice.

"Do NOT take him to the hospital," Buffalo advised. "They'll pump his stomach and traumatize him for life. Just keep him warm and safe and let him enjoy the trip. Oh, and give him lots and lots of orange juice."

So, that's what my parents did. I don't remember any of it, but I apparently spent a long time marveling at my fingers and toes, as well as a particular picture on the wall ("That boat's moving," I observed). And I really, really liked the orange juice.

My first and last trip.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/16/2022

Hello, and welcome to the eighty-sixth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Sometimes, I'll be looking at an old Facebook post of mine and I'll come across a "like" or a comment from a person who is no longer my Facebook friend, but who is still active on Facebook, which means that person unfriended me at some point. This has happened maybe a dozen times or so.

Which is fine, but it does make me wonder, you know... why?

I think maybe the answer, like the answers to so many of life's riddles, can be found in the 1992 movie "Sneakers," which features as a plot point a company called Setec Astronomy. Setec Astronomy, of course, turns out to be an anagram for:

Too many secrets.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/18/2022

Hello, and welcome to the eighty-seventh episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Years ago, on my first day at a new job, my soon-to-be good friend Barry Dodd came into my office and asked me if I wanted to go to lunch with him and his department (Amie Marzen and Dylan Robnett). I said yes, of course, because I didn't really have anything to do yet, and Barry was the nicest person I'd met so far. We went to IHoP, where Dylan asked the server, "What kind of juice do you have?"

"We have orange, apple and cranberry," she replied.

"Do you have pineapple?" Dylan asked as a follow-up.

"No, we don't."

"Then I guess I won't have juice," he said

The waitress went away, and this is what I said to Dylan. (Keep in mind, I had JUST met these people, and as of that moment, they were my only friends at my new job.) I said: "Did she SAY she had pineapple?"

(Come to think of it, maybe THIS is why people unfriend me.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/21/2022

Hello, and welcome to the eighty-eighth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I believe in the social contract, that people should and will (for the most part) behave decently towards one another, look out for one another, for the good of society, for the good of everyone. There is an enormous amount of evidence that not everyone feels the way I do, but I still find it surprising and disorientating whenever I see direct evidence of someone willfully ignoring the social contract in my presence. I'll give you an example (one that doesn't involve COVID):

We live on a private road with only four houses. Because it's private, all of its residents must drag their garbage down to the end of the street, where it intersects with a public street, in order for it to be collected by the city. Since our house is on the corner, everyone's garbage ends up at the edge of our lawn as it awaits pickup.

Which is fine. All part of the social contract. But shortly after we moved in, we noticed that one of our neighbors (we didn't know which one) liked to take his garbage down early—sometimes two or three days early, where it would just sit there on our lawn awaiting pickup. Not ideal, but still fine. Except, he didn't put his trash in a barrel; he just dropped at the edge of our lawn these big, heavy garbage-swollen garbage bags, which would inevitably be torn open by animals, their contents strewn all over the rest of our lawn.

Now, if this had been me, I would have been mortified the moment I saw my garbage all over my neighbor's lawn, and I would have immediately picked up every scrap of it. Because I believe in the social contract. But my neighbor, apparently, did not. I mean, he must have seen what had occurred, because I left the garbage strewn across our lawn for several days to give the perpetrator an opportunity to realize his mistake and take corrective action, which he did not.

So I picked it all up myself, and figured it wouldn't happen again. But it did. The next garbage pickup day, the exact same thing happened. And it happened again the next week, and again the week after that. The torn-up bags and garbage-strewn lawn would be impossible to miss if you lived on our street, so the culprit apparently just didn't care. That he would continue to do this, knowing it would result in a garbage-strewn lawn for his neighbor, baffled me. There just wasn't any reason for it.

To make matters worse (not to mention incredibly awkward), we still didn't know which of our neighbors was responsible. Then, at long last, I recovered from among the garbage on our lawn an envelope with a name and address on it. Bingo! I headed over to the house in question to confront the issue head on.

I hate this kind of thing. I hate having to point out to someone that they're being an inconsiderate jerk, when it should be obvious to them that they're being an inconsiderate jerk. But I hate picking up somebody else's garbage off my lawn even more.

When I got to the house, there was a man standing out front, a burly fellow with a walrus mustache. I explained who I was and where I lived, and asked him if he knew who was leaving bags of garbage at the edge of our lawn.

"No, I don't," he told me. "Those were there when I got home."

"Well, do you know who [name on the envelope I had found] is?"

"Yes I do," he said, adding nothing more. For all I knew, he was [name on the envelope I had found].

"Well, his mail is in the middle of all that garbage on my lawn," I said.¹

The man rolled his eyes. "That's my kid brother," he told me. "I don't know why he didn't use the barrels in the garage."

"Yeah, I've wondered that myself."

" He will be called and it will be taken care of," he said, his use of the passive voice somehow unsettling. I thanked him and headed back home.

About twenty minutes later, as I was putting the kids to bed, there was a loud banging on our front door. We have a doorbell, so the banging was a little odd. I went to the door and there stood my neighbor, looking somewhat pissed off. He pointed to my lawn and said, "I just want you to take note: I manned up and picked up every piece of garbage off your lawn."

"Well, I appreciate it," I said.

"And I called my brother and he has been reprimanded."

"Thank you for speaking to him," I said.

He stared at me for a full beat, then said: "I'm glad I was able to keep my cool with you. I'm an 18-year veteran who's battling PTSD."

"Well," I said. "Thank you for your service."

"I was happy to do it," he said. "But now my wife doesn't know how to deal with me and she kicked me out and I'm living with my mother."

Okay, I felt bad for the guy, and I was grateful that he took care of the garbage issue, but now I felt like the social contract was breaking down once again. Just keep your corn cobs off my lawn and your marital troubles private. Is that too much to ask?

Maybe it was. Maybe now I was guilty of violating the social contract. Maybe a better neighbor would have known what to say to the guy.

But me, I had no idea.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹If you are reminded of this bit from "Alice's Restaurant," you are not alone.

Envelope

2/23/2022

Hello, and welcome to the eighty-ninth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When my cousin Emily Polk posted a picture of her (truly beautiful) daughter on Facebook, my mom (Joanne Tulonen) commented, "She is the most beautiful child ever!"—which is exactly the thing you want to see from your own mother.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/25/2022

Hello, and welcome to the ninetieth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

The summer after my freshman year in college, my dad suggested I go knock on a few doors of places I might like to work, which is something dads have been saying for generations now, even though the hiring process mostly doesn't work that way anymore. Still, I headed out to the brand-new Ben & Jerry's plant at the edge of town, found the manager's office, and asked him if he was looking to hire anyone.

"We haven't even opened yet!" he said. (The plant was actually in the final stages of construction.)

"Yeah, but YOU'RE here," I pointed out. "Maybe YOU need some help."

He looked at me. "What's your story?" he said.

I told him my story. I was 18, so it was pretty short.

"Do you think you can do a job mostly on your own, mostly unsupervised?"

"Sure," I said, because what else would I say?

"Can you leave for Florida tomorrow?"

"Wait, what?"

So, that's how I got the job as a Ben & Jerry's taste tester (official title: quality control technician) in Tampa, Florida, at a foundering ice cream factory that had taken on Ben & Jerry's overflow to stay afloat. Ben & Jerry's flew me down, put me up in a motel, gave me an hourly wage, a company car, and a daily meal allowance; and every fifteen minutes for ten hours a day, I would taste the vanilla ice cream coming out of the tanks to make sure it was meeting quality standards.

Sometimes, dads are right.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/28/2022

Hello, and welcome to the ninety-first episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I collect nurse books.

Now, you might be wondering: What does that mean?

What that means is I have a collection of (mostly) paperback books that are (mostly) fiction, and every single one of those books has the word "nurse" in the title.

You might also be wondering: How many books could there possibly be in that category? I do not know the answer to that question, but I can tell you that there are currently 442¹ volumes in my collection.

You might also be wondering: Are all those books by the same author?

The answer is no, though some authors—like the prolific Peggy Dern née Gaddis, for example—have many, many contributions to the genre. I have 12 of her books published under the name Dern, and 26 under the name Gaddis; and there are still plenty of Peggy's books I have not yet acquired.

You might also be wondering: Are these, uh, adult books? Is this just a giant collection of nurse-specific literary erotica?

The overwhelming majority of these books are tame, '50s- and '60s-era romances, but yes, there is a small handful of spicier titles in the mix.

You might also be wondering: Does Greg read these books?

The answer is no, I haven't read a single one of them, but I do always check out the first sentence. Here's my favorite, from Nurse Nolan's Private Duty by Adeline McElfresh:

The Cadwallader place was everything Giff had said it was, Nurse Jill Nolan thought as she drove Carol Cadwallader Winston's robin's-egg-blue Lincoln from highway onto the long, circuitous white-rock driveway that led toward a tall pillared, shining-white house that looked as if Nature and not man had crowned the hill with it.

That, my friends, is an opening sentence!

You might also be wondering: Does Greg really not read any of these books?

I'll tell you again: No.

You might also be wondering: How long has this been going on?

It started in high school, really took off in college (with a plethora of used bookstores near the campus), tapered off for many years, with all my nurse books packed up in boxes, but then it picked up again once I got this bookcase.

You might also be wondering: Why?

But I'm afraid that's all the time we have for questions right now.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹ROLLING UPDATE: The count now stands at Loading....

3/2/2022

Hello, and welcome to the ninety-second episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Until very recently, I thought Lena Dunham, creator and star of the HBO series "Girls," was the daughter of Jeff Dunham, the ventriloquist. I really think I might have read that somewhere, years ago, although in retrospect, it was likely somebody's joke I simply didn't get.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/4/2022

Hello, and welcome to the ninety-third episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When my kids were very little, I used to make up Oliver and Oliver stories for them at bedtime—the first Oliver being Oliver the Man in the Cowboy Hat, and the second Oliver being Oliver the Talking Dog.

Each story began: "Oliver the Man in the Cowboy Hat and Oliver the Talking Dog were driving down the road," and each story ended with Oliver and Oliver getting back in their car and driving away from wherever they'd just been.

Between the beginning and the ending, Oliver and Oliver would get into various adventures and explorations, invariably running into some sort of gatekeeper or ticket taker who would tell Oliver the Man in the Cowboy Hat that his dog couldn't come in, to which Oliver the Man in the Cowboy Hat would always say, "First of all, he's not my dog. He's my friend who happens to be a dog. And second of all, he's no ordinary dog. He's a talking dog."

The person preventing entry would then (always) respond, "There's no such thing as a talking dog," after which Oliver the Talking Dog would (always) interject, "Excuse me, but yes there is, because I am one."

"Oh my goodness!" the person would (always) exclaim. "I've never seen a talking dog before."

"How do you know?" Oliver the Talking Dog would (always) reply. "Maybe you saw one who wasn't talking at the moment."

Which is to say, there was a lot of repetition in these stories, which was part of the fun, but there was plenty of room for variation too, with Oliver and Oliver going to the circus, and skydiving, and a haunted house, and a taco stand (Oliver the Talking Dog really loved tacos), and a radio station, and a talking animal convention, and so on. Eventually, we realized that maybe we should be recording these stories, and so nine of them are preserved. Someday, I should really write them down and try to publish them, but for now they're just marvelous little time capsules from my children's childhood.

Of all the stories, this is my favorite:

Oliver & Oliver Go Skydiving

It's my favorite for many reasons, but mostly because there's a lot of hilarious kibitzing from the kids, especially when it comes to the actual skydiving part. It also reveals some pretty intriguing differences between their risk assessments of Kate and me when it comes to the hypothetical question of one of us going skydiving ourselves.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/7/2022

Hello, and welcome to the ninety-fourth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In her great book on writing, "Bird By Bird," Anne Lamott writes:

Publication is not going to change your life or solve your problems. Publication will not make you more confident or more beautiful, and it will probably not make you any richer. There will be a very long buildup to publication day, and then the festivities will usually be over rather quickly.

The fourth short story I ever had published was in my college alumni magazine, when I won its annual fiction contest. I was so excited for this one, because my previous fiction publications had all been in small literary journals nobody ever sees or reads, but this was a real magazine, one that most of my friends (and also my mother!) would have delivered right into their mailboxes.

I told no one. I figured when the magazine arrived, my friends (and mom) would all be shocked and amazed, and the emails would start pouring in. "𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺!" and "𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴!" and "𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯'𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘶𝘴?" I imagined these emails saying.

On the day the magazine arrived, I didn't hear from anybody at all, which didn't surprise me. I might have gotten my copy early, and besides, it takes time to actually read a magazine once you get it. I didn't hear from anybody on the second day either, which was hardly cause for concern. Then I didn't hear from anybody on the third day or the fourth day or the fifth day. Or the sixth. By the time two weeks had gone by without hearing from anybody, it occurred to me that maybe I myself don't read our alumni magazine all that thoroughly, with the exception of the class notes and the obituaries, and maybe it was actually pretty likely that nobody would ever even notice my story without a certain amount of prompting.

So, I sent out an email blast, but I understand now that I was guilty then, as I so often still am, of the same thing Anne Lamott's editor once accused her of (as quoted in the same chapter of "Bird By Bird"): "You have made the mistake of thinking that everything that has happened to you is interesting."

(Nevertheless, "Greg Tulonen Secrets" will continue.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/9/2022

Hello, and welcome to the ninety-fifth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This first bit isn't really a secret, but I'll tell you anyway: Like most people, I really hate public speaking. For me, it's visceral. My first experience (that I can recall) came in seventh grade, when I re-wrote Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Tell-Tale Heart," from the murder victim's point of view. My teacher (Debbie Cranson) was so impressed, she invited me to read it aloud in front of the class, a prospect that filled me with terror and dread. But I did it, my stomach churning furiously the entire time. Afterwards, she asked for comment from the class, and after an excruciating pause that lingered long enough to become pregnant, one classmate offered, "I liked the words you used."

"Any particular ones?" I said, and immediately felt better. (It seems I was a smart-ass, even then.)

On another occasion, I read a short story called "Juggling in the Dark" at an open mic literary event in New York City. I was in my 20s, which may be self-evident from every single aspect of the previous sentence. During the reading, I began to experience hysterical blindness, something I didn't even know was a thing until that moment. Gradually, my vision darkened and narrowed, until I was seeing the world through a tiny pinhole, exposing one word at a time on the page in front of me. I was terrified that the hole was going to close up, and I would be unable to continue. Then, at the precise moment I came to the final word of the story, there was an abrupt and immediate iris-in, like the start of a new scene in an old silent movie, and my eyesight was completely restored.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/11/2022

Hello, and welcome to the ninety-sixth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In 2014, I was involved with two films in Maine's horror short film festival Damnationland—"Sui Generis" directed by Jenny Anastasoff, and "On a Country Road" directed by Barry Dodd. I wrote "On a Country Road" based on an episode of the classic old radio show "Suspense," and co-wrote "Sui Generis" with Jenny based on ideas we hashed out together. I was also on set for both shoots, holding boom mics, toting equipment, working the slate, etc.

Deep into the "Sui Generis" shoot, director of photography Phil Cormier—to whom I had been introduced by name (but not by job) at the beginning of the day—suddenly put it together that my role on the film was more than just best boy. He turned to me and said, "Wait, are you Greg the writer?"

"Yes," I told him.

He was clearly astonished. He shook my hand and introduced himself all over again. Then he turned to Jenny and said, "This is Greg the writer!"

Jenny served him up a level gaze that lasted for a full beat. "Co-writer," she said.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

(Stay tuned Monday for my "On a Country Road" secret.)

UPDATE: "Sui Generis" can now be found here.

3/14/2022

Hello, and welcome to the ninety-seventh episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

As mentioned in the last secret, I had a hand in two films for the 2014 Damnationland, Maine's horror short film festival—"On a Country Road" directed by Barry Dodd, and "Sui Generis" directed by Jenny Anastasoff, writing (and co-writing, Jenny would hasten to add) the scripts and working on the sets of both shoots.

On the night of the Damnationland event at the State Theatre in Portland, Maine, I ran into "On a Country Road" star Kip Weeks in the lobby before the show started. He greeted me warmly. We knew each other previously from "Ragged Isle" and various other Maine film scene connections. Then he asked me if I was involved in any of that night's films. I gave him an odd look. "Well, yeah," I told him. "I wrote the film you're in."

Kip looked stricken, and then, as if in supplication, he touched his forehead to mine, the exact same move he'd made with his "Ragged Isle" love interest, Krystal Brewer, in episode 19.

I forgave him instantly.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

UPDATE: "On a Country Road" can now be found here.

3/16/2022

Hello, and welcome to the ninety-eighth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was in the fifth grade, I wrote a short story about a superhero named Dust-Man, whose superpower was the ability to turn into a cloud of dust whenever a crime was happening nearby. (Key line, uttered by a criminal being chased by the hero: "It's Dust-Man! Achoo!") Of course Dust-Man had an alter-ego, a mild-mannered office worker, and the story ended with Dust-Man falling asleep in his alter-ego's office after a long day of fighting crime, whereupon he was vacuumed up by the janitor.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/18/2022

Hello, and welcome to the ninety-ninth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This is a story about my shaky journalistic integrity. In high school, I wrote for the school paper ("The Shields"). I'll admit this right now: There wasn't much to cover in Wilsall, Montana (pop. 237). I mean, once you recapped the previous week's high school basketball games and relayed the next week's school lunch menu, it was something of a dry well. I was always on the lookout for a juicy story, but juicy stories were thin on the ground. No cheating scandals. No teacher strikes. No lunch lady kickbacks. Nothing. Then one day my buddy Jeff Hereim mentioned to me that somebody had swiped his trumpet, and was demanding donuts for its return. Bingo!

A crucial rule of journalism ethics is: "Report the story; don't become part of it." But I cheerfully disregarded this guidance and composed a message to the unknown miscreants. (Actually, Jeff was pretty sure he knew who had done this, but for the sake of the story I pretended we had no idea.) My message read: "To the kidnappers: The ransom will be placed in the popcorn machine in the cafeteria at 7 a.m. tomorrow. Leave the trumpet and there will be no questions asked." I surreptitiously placed this note in the announcements basket in the school office, hoping our principal Mr. Franks would read it over the loudspeaker as part of morning announcements. I thought this might be a long shot, because Mr. Franks seemed like a fairly humorless fellow to me, but to my delight, he actually read it, and so it was game on.

The next morning, I staked out the popcorn machine and snapped a photo of the kidnappers (a couple of Jeff's basketball teammates, exactly as he had suspected) as they swapped his trumpet for the donuts. Then I wrote up the story for The Shields, casting myself as the hero, a fearless reporter foiling a nefarious kidnapping plot. Of course, the kidnappers actually got the donuts, so I don't know how much foiling I did, but I downplayed that fact in the story, focusing instead on the trumpet's safe recovery (by me).

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/21/2022

Hello, and welcome to the one hundredth episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In second grade, I wrote a short story called "The Hungry Caterpillar." I swear to you, I was completely unaware of the classic Eric Carle children's book called "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," and in fact, when I ran across "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" in a bookstore in my adulthood, I was astonished.

My story bears little resemblance to Carle's work. It concerns a gluttonous caterpillar who becomes so deliriously ravenous when he and his friends encounter a big juicy apple that he enters a kind of hunger-crazed fugue state, devouring the entire apple AND his friends along with it.

Naturally, he's saddened by this development, and weeps copious tears—enough tears to carry him away in a salty flood to another country, where he reinvents himself as a modest eater, loses a bunch of weight, and makes all new friends.

Curiously for a story about a caterpillar, at no point did I consider having him turn into a butterfly.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/23/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 101st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Over the past couple of weeks, I've learned that a short film I wrote, "Derrick & Boyd" (which won the Sanford Independent Film Festival Script-to-Screen competition in 2019, and was subsequently filmed by director Chris Goodwin the following summer), has been selected by the Boston International Film Festival and the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival, both with screenings in April, and the Georgia Shorts Film Festival, with a screening in May. We'll be hearing back from more festivals over the rest of this year, and I'll be documenting any additional acceptances and screening dates on my website.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/25/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 102nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

You may have noticed a theme emerging over my last several secrets, which have all, in one way or another, involved my writing. Today's secret is the story of how I became a writer in the first place.

When I was six years old, I had to go to the hospital for some sort of scan or test. I've forgotten what it was, but I do know that I had to void my bowels before we could get started, and to that end, I was given a chalky milkshake to drink, which was supposed to expedite that process.

Except no. My mother and I sat in a waiting room for a very long time, waiting for the urge to strike me, which it kept on not doing. To pass the time, a nurse gave me some paper and crayons. I wasn't a great drawer, but I knew how to draw a guy with glasses, so that's what I tried to do. I drew the right lens, but when I went to draw the bow, I angled it too high, and it no longer looked like glasses. Looking at this failed attempt, I saw there was maybe something else there. I turned the lens of the glasses into an eyeball, the skewed bow into some feathers, and from there I sketched a giant bird, just like the one I'm holding in this picture.

I liked my giant bird, and I quickly drew a little boy to greet it. Delighted with this effort, I showed it off to my mother and the nurse, who duly praised it, both of them probably wondering why I hadn't pooped yet. The nurse said the bird looked like a Dr. Seuss character, and while that hadn't been what I'd been aiming for, I couldn't disagree.

The next day, I brought the picture into school to show to my teacher, Miss Carlson. She said it was great, and then she said: "You should write a story about it."

You should write a story about it. Her words sank into me like a stone dropped into a deep lake. I should write a story about it. Yes, that's exactly what I should do. I should write a story about it. It was a revelation. Not a stone sinking in a lake, but a key turning in a lock. From that moment—that exact moment—I have never wanted to be anything other than a writer.

There ought to be Congressional medals for people like Miss Carlson, who changed my life with a single offhand remark. And yes, maybe I would have gotten there anyway, but she was the one who sparked it, just by saying, "You should write a story about it."

Over the next couple of weeks, I wrote and illustrated a multi-page story, "Great Bird," about a boy named Jack who encounters a giant bird named Great Bird in a place called Big Land. Sadly, the original copy with the pictures is long gone (though the text has been preserved, typed and mimeographed by my mother), but I can still draw Great Bird pretty well—or at least exactly the same way I drew him when I was six.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/28/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 103rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My mother (Joanne Tulonen) once took me out to dinner along with a gentleman friend of hers and a girlfriend of mine. When the meal was over, the waitress brought the check and placed it deliberately and decidedly in front of my mother's gentleman friend. My mother rolled her eyes at this, reached over, and slipped her credit card into the little leather folder holding the bill. A few minutes later, the waitress swept past the table and scooped up the card and holder without glancing at either. A few minutes after that, I saw the waitress step out of the kitchen and look with confusion at all the diners, then retreat back into the kitchen, shaking her head. Then, a moment later, she opened the kitchen door again and again looked at all the diners, as if a second glance would yield a different answer. It didn't. Finally, the waitress approached our table, clearly befuddled, and said directly to my mother's gentleman friend, "I'm sorry. but is your name Joanne?"

You see, in this waitress's mind, it was more plausible that my mother's gentleman friend was named Joanne than it was that my mother was paying the bill.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/30/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 104th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the early '90s, I attended a Halloween party at which two people were dressed as the hip-hop duo Kris Kross (they were white, but their backwards clothes were the big tell). I told them I really liked the song "Sailing."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/1/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 105th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Years ago, I had emergency surgery to have my gallbladder removed. This occurred after multiple trips to the E.R. over multiple weeks (and one trip to my primary care physician), all for severe abdominal pain, which each time was misdiagnosed as simple constipation. On my third E.R. trip, I insisted on a CAT scan, which was provided, revealing a gallbladder that had to come out immediately, and by "immediately," I mean I lay on a gurney for six hours until a surgeon became available.

They knocked me out for the operation, of course, and when I came to, I found myself in a hospital room being transferred by a team of six orderlies from a gurney onto a bed. As this was happening, at the very moment I was hanging in mid-air between gurney and bed, I saw that my new roommate was watching TV, and—somewhat surreally—I was on the TV, in one of the commercials produced by the TV station I worked for. It was this commercial right here (written and directed by Amie Marzen):

No one else in the room noticed that I was the prevaricating pitchman prattling away on the screen (why would they?), which just made the moment all the more surreal.

(As an aside, when my younger child was five years old, they used to get up in the morning, and—all by themselves—operate the Roku to play this commercial over and over again. That's how good it is.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

(On Monday, I'll tell you what it took for me to be discharged from the hospital.)

4/4/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 106th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

On Friday, I told you about the time I had emergency surgery to have my gallbladder removed. After an operation like that, your average insurance company would like very much for you to be discharged very, very quickly; and my insurance company at the time was no exception. However, the one barrier to me being able to leave the hospital—and this is both ridiculous and embarrassing—was that I had lost the ability to urinate. I could feel my full bladder, and it would feel exactly like I needed to pee, but when I tried to pee, nothing happened. I would just stand in front of the toilet, sadly not peeing.

Apparently, this can be a side effect of the anesthesia, and the treatment is for a nurse to insert a catheter every few hours and relieve the patient manually. I cannot recommend this procedure to anyone. Ever.

They told me that as soon as I could pee on my own, I could go home, so my motivation was pretty high. However, my 80-year-old roommate had taken a keen interest in my predicament, and his interest was seriously psyching me out. Every time I would get up to go to the bathroom—no matter what time it was, no matter how casual or quiet I tried to be, no matter how certain I was that he was sound asleep—every single time, he would sit bolt upright in bed and say, "Are you trying again?" And every time he did that, it would give me a serious case of the yips, freezing me up each and every time.

About five minutes after HE was discharged, I was finally able to pee.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/6/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 107th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Someone once asked me what my favorite measuring cup was, and I actually had an opinion.

In case you were wondering (and I know you were), it's my one-eighth-cup measuring cup, seen here. Whenever a recipe calls for two tablespoons of something, I reach for my trusty one-eighth.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/8/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 108th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Only a few days after I started a new job at a TV station in Portland, I was working at my computer, and I noticed that hundreds if not thousands of tiny little bugs were crawling all over my desk and chair. I mean, this was my office, people. Where I worked. An office. Not a garbage dump or a circus tent!

I immediately broke down my computer, monitor, and keyboard, and set them up in the conference room so I could continue my work bug-free. I didn't ask permission to do this, but I did ask for an exterminator for my office. A couple hours later, the Sales team kicked me out of the conference room for a client meeting, and I told my boss I'd be playing Flying Dutchman around the premises until someone had dealt with the bugs in my office. The exterminator came a couple of hours after I had gone home for the day, and she found the building locked. The station was staffed 24-7, but after hours, you had to ring the bell to get someone to come let you in. There was a sign and everything. But she didn't ring the bell. She just went home.

She came back the next morning, sprayed pesticide all around my office, and suggested that a dead animal in the ducts might be the source. The building management company sent some folks up to the roof to poke around the ducts, but they couldn't find anything, so they considered the issue closed. Reluctantly, so did I.

(By the way, no other office in the building was affected by this issue. I was the new guy, and didn't want to cultivate a reputation as a complainer, but come on, man.)

A few days later, I was working at my desk, and I noticed a slight movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked down and saw a big, fat, white maggot crawling across my desk, towards me. I stood up and realized that there were 7 or 8 maggots crawling around the floor of my office.

Maggots. It was at that point that I began to wonder if I had somehow offended a djinn or something. I mean, seriously. Maggots? What the hell?

At my insistence, the building management company was called again, and again they went up on the roof to inspect the ducts. They told me that everything was capped and sealed, and there couldn't possibly be anything in the ducts. They also advised me that I shouldn't leave food lying around my office for long periods of time, which I assured them was NOT the problem.

After some pretty vigorous pushback on my part (complainer reputation be damned), they cleared out my office, sprayed with pesticide and steam-cleaned the carpets. They also went up on the roof and checked the vents one more time. This time, they discovered a previously unnoticed hole in the duct, and two dead pigeons inside. They looked down the vent, which was crawling with mites and maggots, and could see pretty much directly into my office.

So they sucked out the entire vent with a power vac and steam-cleaned everything again, but it was a long time before I could walk into my office without getting the heebie-jeebies.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/10/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 109th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I have many items of furniture made for me by my grandfather, Carleton Finch. He used to be quite the carpenter in his spare time, and the pieces he made for me are beautiful: a bookshelf, a coffee table (with matching end tables), a coat rack, a butcher block table—all of them built to the specifications of whatever dorm room or apartment I was living in at the time. All around my house are reminders of his craftsmanship, and his love.

The first Christmas after Kate and I got engaged, he gave her a pie safe (seen in this photo, and featuring copper door plates punched out by Peg Finch). When he presented it to her, he said, "I want you to understand: This is YOURS." He jerked his thumb at me. "If this guy's ever dumb enough to leave you, YOU keep the pie safe."

Anyway, today is his 99th birthday. Happy birthday, Grampy!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/13/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 110th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

The following is a transcript of an actual conversation I had with an employee at a Portland, Maine deli one day in 2009:

Me: Could I get an oatmeal cookie?

Employee: Oatmeal raisin?

Me: Sure.

Employee: I'm sorry, sir. The only kind of cookies we have are peanut butter and chocolate chip.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/15/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 111th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I was in line at the post office, and the customer at the counter was making the clerk go through every one of his fifty-cent pieces (and not just the fifty-cent pieces in his till, but every fifty-cent piece in the facility, numbering in the hundreds) to see if any of them was minted the year her son was born, so she could give it to him as a birthday present.

This happened nine years ago, but I still think about that lady sometimes, and how I should have gone up to her and sternly said, "Look, your request is far outside the scope of this man's duties. There are people waiting here, and I think you need to let him serve these people, and then (if he feels like it) he can help you look for 50-cent pieces, all right?"

That's what my dad would have done, I'm certain, but I didn't. I just stood in line and fumed. But even though it made the wait much, much longer, I was secretly very happy every single time (out of hundreds!) the next fifty-cent piece didn't match her requested year. She left the post office fifty-cent-piece-less, it pleases me to report.

After all that, the clerk had so many fifty-cent pieces in his till, he gave me my change (several dollars, as I recall) exclusively in half dollars. And do you know what my fantasy was right then and there? That among my change would be a fifty-cent piece with the date she wanted, the clerk having somehow missed it the first time around. That didn't happen, but if it HAD happened, I would have chased that lady down, showed it to her, and then swallowed it in front of her.

That was my little fantasy anyway. Maybe that makes me a bad person.

(But I don't think so.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/18/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 112th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One of my first jobs was working as a gate attendant at the Volvo Tennis Tournament in Stratton Mountain, Vermont, checking coolers at the entrance and confiscating any alcohol. (You could drink at the tournament, but only alcohol purchased on the premises at ludicrously jacked-up prices.) We were kept pretty busy with this task, except when it rained and the tournament shut down for the day. When that happened, all the gate attendants gathered in the shack we took our breaks in, but our boss did not like to see us idle, so he sent us out to mop up the rainwater puddling in all the seats in the stands. I pointed out that this was a somewhat Sisyphean task in the middle of the pouring rain, but this observation was met with angry scorn.

One day (a different day, a sunny day), John McEnroe and his new bride Tatum O'Neal were sunbathing just outside the players' lounge, which was surrounded by a chain-link fence. One of my gate attendant coworkers decided it would be a good idea to call out to McEnroe: "Hey, McEnroe! Tatum's a cunt!"

(Yeah, I have no idea why he thought that was a good idea, but that's what he did.)

McEnroe stood up, walked over to the chain-link fence, hopped over the chain-link fence, and slammed my coworker up against the giant tennis etiquette sign by the entrance, screaming in his face like the kid was a nearsighted line judge.

Security was quickly summoned, and after they arrived and assessed the situation, they took my coworker away in the back of a patrol car. I never saw him again.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/20/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 113th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When my older son was four years old, he had a cow costume he loved (seen in this picture—look at those little feet!) For some reason, he told us this costume should be called his "astronaut suit."

"Then I guess that makes you a cows-monaut," I told him.

"No!" he said.

"Or maybe Veal Armstrong."

He didn't get it. He gets it now, but he maintains the exact same level of indifference to my undeniable wit.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/22/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 114th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

By the time the movie "Boxing Helena" came out in 1993, it had already been subject to endless media scrutiny. The director was David Lynch's daughter, and David Lynch was near the height of his fame. The movie's premise—a surgeon amputates a woman's limbs to keep her captive in his home—was both transgressive and disturbing. Madonna famously dropped out of the project very close to production, and her replacement, Kim Bassinger, dropped out even closer. The film's male star, Ed Harris, tired of the delays, dropped out as well.

When the movie was finally completed (with lower-wattage celebs Sherilyn Fenn and Julian Sands), it received an NC-17 rating, which was downgraded to an R upon appeal. All of this was breathlessly covered in the press before the film's eventual release. Which is to say, it would have been very, very difficult to walk into this movie without already knowing what it was about.

But not impossible.

When I saw the movie in New York City with Chad Anderson and Kate Culkin, one guy in the audience clearly DIDN'T know what it was about beforehand, because when the amputation "twist" was finally revealed, he uttered a loud, baffled "What the fuck?"

If ever an audience turned on a movie in a single moment, this was it. Everyone in the theater erupted in ferocious laughter, and from that point forward, "Boxing Helena" was an unintentional comedy. To be fair, that's probably the only way to derive any enjoyment at all out of "Boxing Helena," which features (among its many sins) an "it was all a dream" ending, which should have gone permanently out of style the moment Dorothy woke up back in Kansas.

Sorry. That's a "Boxing Helena" spoiler (and a "Wizard of Oz" spoiler too, I guess).

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/25/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 115th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

For the past 30 years or so, Chad Anderson and I have forever been on the hunt for (at least) a third person to play Hearts with us. This is harder than it sounds. Most of our friends refuse to play with us anymore. Who knows why, but maybe it's due to our intense bordering on obnoxious gameplay. ["bordering on"? -ed.] Our friend Alison was incredibly freaked out by the hostility of our exchanges until Chad explained that all that vitriol was only in the context of the game. And that was fine until the day I foiled one too many of Chad's moonshot attempts, whereupon he stood up and screamed in my face, "I hate you, Greg! And that's NOT just in the context of the game! It's in real life too!" After that, Alison wouldn't play with us anymore.

(I'm reminded of a line from Anne Tyler's "The Accidental Tourist," describing a complex card game invented by four siblings in childhood, which they still play as adults: "Sarah had folded her fan of cards and laid them face down – the last of the wives to give up.")

Another time, Chad and I tried to teach the game to our neighbor across the hall. We attempted multiple times to explain the rules to her, but she just wasn't getting it. Finally, we proposed playing an "open" hand, with all the cards face-up on the table. So that's what we did, playing out a full hand, helping her with her choices, and explaining why each card would be played at that particular moment.

"So, what do you think?" we asked her when the open hand was done. "Do you want to play an actual game?"

"I don't know," she said. "Do you know any games where we don't look at each other's cards?"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/27/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 116th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One time when I was moving, I was so incredibly organized for almost all of my packing, carefully segregating all of my belongings into boxes and labeling those boxes by room and by category. Towards the end, though, things got a bit chaotic, and I distinctly remember one box being labeled "PANTS & LAMPS."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/29/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 117th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I lived in Montana, I was keenly aware whenever I was walking through the scrub brush on the flat, flat plains leading up to the state's mountain ranges that there could be rattlesnakes about. I would keep an ear out for the telltale rattle, but the problem with that was that cicadas sound very much like rattlesnakes, and cicadas were EVERYWHERE. I'd be walking, and I'd hear a cicada, and my mind would scream, "Was that a rattlesnake?" and it wouldn't be a rattlesnake. It would be a cicada, every single time. Until...

I was going swimming in a creek with some folks, and we had to cut through a culvert to get to the swimming area. As I was stepping over a rock at the entrance to the culvert, I heard a rattle, and this time, my mind didn't scream "Was that a rattlesnake?" because this time, my mind screamed: "THAT'S A RATTLESNAKE!"

Except it wasn't.

It was TWO rattlesnakes.

My foot froze in mid-stride, hovering a few inches above the coiled snakes, and then I jumped back about fifteen feet.

I wish I could say we decided we didn't need to go swimming that day, and that we just turned around and went home. But that's not what happened. What happened was, one of the people I was with, a gung-ho sort of fellow, killed the snakes by dropping a great big rock on their heads. This actually took several tries, the snakes rearing back menacingly as he approached them again and again with successively bigger rocks.

Then we walked past the dead snakes and went swimming, and when we came back through, a few hours later, their tails were still slowly whipping back and forth from beneath that great big rock.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/2/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 118th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

There's an old website called Superuseless Superpowers, which imagined truly useless supernatural abilities, like 13th Bullet Bulletproof (i.e. the first twelve bullets do real damage to your body, but the thirteenth bullet bounces right off) or In-Flight Flight (can fly like Superman, but only within the confines of an airplane that's already in flight), and my favorite, Turning Into a Brick Wall. Forever:

"The power to transform into a brick wall is truly awesome. Except when you can only do it once and can't ever change back. And while Larry's powers did momentarily save his village from the barbarians...they came back later with a ladder."

The whole thing got me thinking about some real-life superuseless superpowers of my own, like this one:

I'm an incredible catcher of things falling unexpectedly. Something tumbles off a shelf or counter, and I catch it with ease. Left-handed, right-handed. It doesn't matter. I'm ambidextrously astonishing. I'm Willie Mays in the 1954 World Series, miraculously plucking falling objects out of the air with style and grace. I've even caught things with my feet. But here's the catch (heh): This superpower only works when I'm alone, if absolutely no one is watching. If someone's in the same room as me when something falls, I'll very likely bat the falling object straight into a wall, shattering it. And playing outfield in front of a huge crowd? That pop-fly's hitting the grass.

So, you'll just have to trust me on this: I'm a really, really good catcher (you know, when no one is watching).

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

(Stay tuned all this week for more superuseless superpowers.)

5/4/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 119th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

On Monday, I told you about my superuseless superpower of being an amazing catcher of falling objects (when nobody is watching). Today, I'd like to tell you about an even more superuseless superpower, which is this: I will always be last in line at the bank. When I go to the bank, there's never a free teller when I get there. There's always a line. So I get in the line, and I'm last in line. Nothing unusual about any of that, but hold on: The entire time I'm waiting in line, whether it's five minutes or 45 (and it's usually closer to the latter than the former), nobody ever gets in line behind me. I'm always the last person. Always. When it's finally my turn, no other customers are waiting. So theoretically, if I'd come in at that moment, I could have been served immediately without having to wait. Of course, if I'd come in at that moment, there WOULD have been a line.

Because of my superuseless superpower.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time with yet another superuseless superpower.

5/6/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 120th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

All this week, I've been telling you about my superuseless superpowers, like making amazing catches when nobody's watching or always being last in line at the bank. Today, I'd like to tell you about my last superuseless superpower. Or maybe this one's not a superpower at all, but rather a very odd phenomenon. Either way, it's definitely superuseless. Here it is:

Because I work from home, and because there are usually family members around while I'm working, I'm often reading something while the television is on in the background, or writing something while an unrelated conversation takes place nearby. Sometimes as I'm reading or writing, I'll come to a word at the exact same moment the exact same word is being uttered in that unrelated conversation or TV show. I'm not talking about common words like "and" or "the." I'm talking about more unusual words like "avuncular" or "fortitude." I've described this phenomenon to others and been met with either blank stares or quarter-hearted acknowledgment that yeah, maybe that happens sometimes. This happens to me two or three times a day, every single day. As far as I can tell, it serves no purpose, other than to make me think I'm living in a complex computer simulation, and these flickering moments of word synchronicity are just tiny glitches in the matrix.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/9/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 121st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was 21, I dreamed that I woke up and God was at the foot of my bed. He wasn't in the form of a physical person, but rather a blindingly bright light (though it somehow didn't at all hurt to look directly at it). "Am I dead?" I asked, in my dream. "No," God reassured me. "It'll be a long, long time before you die. Why, you don't die until you're 23."

Then I woke up.

I mean, I knew it was just a dream, but I did feel a small sense of relief when I turned 24.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/11/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 122nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Sophomore year in college, a guy I only kind of knew stopped me on the stairwell of our dorm and opened up a Playboy centerfold right in front of me. "Look at this," he insisted. "She's younger than us!" The idea seemed to fill him with wonder. I didn't know what to tell him. I assumed then that by the time we graduated, such a thing would be a regular occurrence, but I never bothered to confirm.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/13/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 123rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once got pulled over for running a red light. I was guilty as hell, but in my defense, it was a red left arrow accompanied by a green straight-ahead light, which, as I've previously mentioned, is the stupidest traffic light configuration ever invented. Seriously: Unless there's something obscuring left-turning drivers' ability to evaluate oncoming traffic, the red left arrow is pointless when the straight-going drivers have the green. But I digress. The point is, I ran the red light to take my left and I got nailed for it. But the officer who pulled me over also cited me for failing to register my car, which I was decidedly NOT guilty of.

The registration I handed him and the sticker on my license plate were both current, but he told me that the Bureau of Motor Vehicles database listed my car as unregistered. The obvious conclusion to be drawn here is that the online BMV database wasn't properly updated, but the conclusion this officer apparently drew (I guess) was that my registration and license plate stickers were cunning forgeries.

I paid the running-the-red-light ticket (as I said, I was guilty as hell), but I contested the failure-to-register ticket, and got myself a court date. When the day came, I dressed up in a jacket and tie (unnecessarily, as it turns out) and headed down to the courthouse, where three assistant district attorneys huddled with defendants to work out settlements or fines in lieu of trials.

When it was my turn, the ADA asked me what my story was. I produced the registration and she said, "So you got it registered after the violation." "No," I said. "It was registered at the time." I then produced a letter from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, which I had procured before my trial, confirming that the car was registered at the time of the alleged violation.

"So, you didn't have the registration in the car when you were stopped?" asked the ADA. "No, I had it with me," I said. "And you gave it to the officer?" she asked. "Yes."
She furrowed her brow. "I don't understand," she said. "Why did he ticket you if you showed him the registration?"

"I don't know," I said, "but that's why I'm here this morning."

She shook her head in irritation. "Well, I'm not going to waste time trying to figure out why somebody else did something." She checked the box labeled "dismissed" on my violation form, and justice was served.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/16/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 124th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When we moved to New York City, Chad Anderson and I sometimes used to prank (I use that term loosely) each other by saying, "Oh my God! Look behind you. It's [insert random celebrity's name]!" The thing is, on the compact, crowded isle of Manhattan, celebrity sightings are not uncommon, so it was certainly possible for, say, Richard Dreyfuss to be crossing the street behind us, but more often than not, he wasn't. Then one night at a Jonathan Richman concert, I said to Chad, "Oh my God! Penn Jillette [of the comedy magician duo Penn & Teller] is at the table behind you. [pause] And he's sitting with Lou Reed!"

"Sure he is," said Chad.

Except this time, it was true, which was awesome. But it was even better a little while later when Jonathan Richman sang his song "Velvet Underground," celebrating Lou Reed's famous band.

(And as an aside, today is Jonathan Richman's birthday.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/18/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 125th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My mom (Joanne Tulonen) went to college with the actor John Shea, who would go on to play Lex Luthor in the '90s TV series "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman," but his first big high-profile movie role was in the 1982 movie "Missing," with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. It was genuinely exciting to go to see it, to see a movie starring someone my mom knew, even if he was playing the titular "missing" character, and therefore would probably not appear in large chunks of the movie. But still. The movie opens with a long, long shot of John Shea looking thoughtfully out a car window as the opening credits roll. Sitting in the theater, a good ways into that long opening shot, I leaned over to my mother and whispered, "Do you think he's thinking about you in this scene?"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/20/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 126th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Ten years ago, I went to a job interview for the Apple Store in South Portland, Maine. The interview was held on a Sunday night, and it wasn't actually called an interview. It was called a "hiring event," held in a hotel conference room with about ten current Apple Store employees and twenty job applicants. In the lobby, we were asked to fill in nametags and stick them to our backs.

When the door opened and the applicants filed in, we were greeted by rows of employees lined up on either side of the doorway, applauding and cheering our entrance, their faces glowing with the fervid conviction of the converted.

We were seated and shown a short video, a montage of happy, bustling Apple Stores around the world, set to a jazzy techno-beat. When it was finished, our host said, "Wasn't that a fun, exciting video?" and I chuckled, because I thought he was being snarky. He wasn't. Fortunately, I had chuckled very, very quietly, because other employees were patrolling behind us, clipboards clutched in their hands, as they took notes on our comments and reactions (the reason our nametags were on our backs).

After about an hour of videos and speechifying about the glory of all things Apple (punctuated with thorny questions for the audience such as "What is it that makes Apple products so great?" and "Would you say you love Apple products or adore Apple products?"), we were split into four small groups for a "fun-tivity," in which we were asked to answer questions like, "If you could give only one gift, what would it be?" or "Describe your ideal kitchen," or "Assuming you had essentials like food and water, what one item would you choose to take with you to a desert island and why?"

On that last question, all of my groupmates responded with Apple products ("My iPod"; "My iPad"; "My iPhone"), and I was thinking God, what a bunch of suck-ups. So, when it was my turn, I said, "I'm struck by the fact that everyone's assuming there's some sort of charging station on this island. Because if there isn't, you'd get to listen to Adele for maybe the first day, and then you'd be like, 'Damn, I wish I'd chosen a first-aid kit.'"

After the small group activity (sorry, "fun-tivity") we split into two large groups and passed an iPad loaded with prompts around in a circle. Each person in the circle would read the question aloud and then have to answer it in under two minutes. Some examples: "Describe a time you had to deliver bad news"; "Talk about a time you succeeded when others thought you would fail"; "Describe a time you came to terms with someone with whom you disagreed."

And then, after two hours of Apple cheerleading and trust exercises, it was over. No questions were asked about our skills or qualifications, because, as they explained, they were simply looking for the right TYPE of people to balance out the mix.

(Whatever that means.)

As we filed out, the employees lined up again to cheer on our departure.

Apparently, I was not the right type of person (my desert island answer probably sank me) because I was not offered a job, though Apple did explain to me that it was "no for now," and I was welcome to apply again in the future.

Now, I ask you: If I omitted the Apple-specific details above, would it sound to you like I was describing a cult initiation?

Because that's what it felt like.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/23/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 127th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When my boys were little, they had a giant rock they'd brought in from outside that they named Big Fat Louie. One summer, with their permission, I finally put Big Fat Louie back outside because people kept tripping over it. But after winter came, they suddenly remembered BFL and wept and wailed and carried on because he had surely frozen to death.

As a parent, I always feel empathy for my kids when they're upset, even when I don't agree with the reason for their distress.

Except this time.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/25/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 128th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I saw the movie "Groundhog Day" in the theater in 1993. About fifteen minutes in, the movie started going out of focus—first a little, then a lot. There were some sporadic shouts of "Focus!" until someone in the audience pointed out that there was no one in the projection booth, which is when everyone in the theater got up to leave. As we were all filing out, it was the exact moment in the film that Bill Murray delivers the line: "Excuse me! Excuse me! Where's everybody going?" Everyone in the theater laughed, and it very briefly occurred to me that maybe this was all a part of the experience, a bit of meta-textual hijinks being perpetrated by director Harold Ramis. But I quickly realized it was just (charming) happenstance.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/27/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 129th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Many years ago, I was living in New York City, about to move into a new apartment with a friend who was moving to the city from out of state. On the day of the lease-signing, my friend went to his bank in the state he was living in and wired his half of the deposit directly into my account. As I was heading out to the broker's office, I called my bank's automated line, just to make sure the money was there.

It wasn't.

I called the bank again, this time to speak to a real-live person, and the real-live person I spoke to explained that wire transfers take two to three days to process.

"Two or three days?" I said, incredulous. (I was much younger then.) "He could have mailed me cash in two to three days."

"Well, we don't recommend mailing cash," the person told me.

"I need that money deposited into my account immediately," I advised.

"That's not possible," said the person. "The money isn't even here yet."

"Of course it's there," I said. "It's certainly not in my friend's account anymore. Where is it if not in your coffers?"

"The transaction still has to be processed."

"Then process it. I need that money today!"

"I'm afraid I can't do that."

"Then let me speak to someone who CAN do that."

"There is no such person. It can't be done."

"Well, let's start with your supervisor."

"[sigh] Please hold."

I worked my way through several more people (and their supervisors), until I finally reached someone who was high enough up, he could (after quite a bit of haranguing on my part) authorize the deposit of the money into my account right away, as a one-time-only courtesy.

The lesson here is: Banks can do this anytime they want. They just don't want to.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/30/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 130th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

As many of you likely recall, back in the Mesozoic era of the '80s and '90s, if you wanted to watch a movie at home, you were at the mercy of whatever was available at your local video store. Sometimes, especially on a Friday night, a trip to the video store might prove fruitless, but my dad, a die-hard movie lover, was never one to give up. He'd inevitably pluck some obscure title from a back rack and insist it would be great. On one such occasion, he brought home the movie, "Run," a now long-forgotten 1991 action thriller starring Patrick Dempsey and Kelly Preston, and tried to sell my stepmom and me on watching it with him. Neither of us bit, so we both went to bed, and my dad stayed up to watch it by himself.

The next day, he told us we'd missed an overlooked classic, his new number-one favorite movie of all time. He proceeded to relay in excruciating detail the entire plot, from first scene to last. I swear, it must have taken him two and half hours to describe everything that had happened in this 90-minute film. It didn't convince either of us that we'd missed out on a gem, but it was certainly amusing to hear him tell us all about it.

Fast-forward about twenty years. (It's funny how that happens, isn't it?) I was flipping channels on TV (remember doing that?), and I came across a movie I knew for sure I'd never seen before, but whose plot beats seemed strangely familiar. I found myself watching, trying to figure out how scene after scene, I knew exactly what was going to happen.

Then it hit me: This was "Run."

(My dad died seven years ago today. I'll be telling stories about him forever.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/1/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 131st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Kate and I were shopping for a mattress once, and the first place we went into, a super-hawkish salesman came right up to us, flashed us a blinding smile, and said, "Hi there! Let me tell you why you're walking out of our store today with one of our premium mattresses."

"We don't want the hard sell," Kate told him, gently but firmly. "We just want to see what you have."

"I'll tell you what we have," he said, uncowed by her warning. "What we have is the mattress you're going to be sleeping on for the next twenty years. Let me tell you why."

He really couldn't turn it off, even after we asked him (repeatedly) to back off just a little bit. His overly aggressive demeanor literally drove us from the store, though he stayed right on our heels as we fled, keeping up his unctuous patter every step of the way.

"Have fun paying more money for a lower-quality product!" he shouted after us as we were walking away from the store.

And you know what? We did.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/3/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 132nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was in my early 20s, my grandmother took me aside and showed me her mother's engagement ring. She told me I could have it when I was ready to ask someone to marry me. I wasn't dating anyone at the moment, which she knew, but she said it would be there when I needed it.

In the years that followed, I did date a bit—one woman who came home with me for several holidays over five years—but my grandmother never said another word to me about the ring.

Then one Thanksgiving, I brought Kate home with me, the first time anyone in my family had met her. A few days later, I called my grandmother. "I need to talk to you about something," I said.

"Yep, I still have the ring for you," she said at once.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/6/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 133rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This happened back when Kate and I were first dating. One day, completely out of the blue, she vehemently refuted something I had said earlier—the only problem being, I had no memory of ever saying such a thing, and told her so.

After a pause, she replied, "Well, the Greg in my head said it."

The fact that I found that both hilarious and charming says a lot about why we're still together.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/7/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 134th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Torrey Ham and I were once talking about "pop culture deal-breakers"—i.e. particular books, movies, TV shows, or musicians that prospective romantic partners might like (or not like, or not have experienced at all) that would cause you to reject them outright. Torrey told me about a friend who lost interest in a woman when he found out she had never watched "The Simpsons." Torrey thought that spoke volumes about her and he supported his friend's decision. Similarly, Torrey once didn't go on a second date with a guy because he hadn't seen the original Star Wars movies.

I countered that perhaps one should look at such occasions as an opportunity: "You haven't seen [blank]? Come over to my house and I'll show you what you've been missing."

"Part of me thinks I should see it that way," said Torrey. "But a bigger part of me questions what the hell they've done with their life."

"But wait a minute," I said. "Kate introduced me to a bunch of stuff I'd missed. 'The Adventures of Pete and Pete,' 'Freakazoid,' 'The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.,' 'Babylon 5'..."

"Wow," Torrey responded, genuinely impressed. "I'd marry her too. A chick who likes 'Freakazoid'? That's a one in a million shot."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/8/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 135th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When Kate and I were about to be married, we stopped by the Kennebunkport town office to get our marriage license squared away. The clerk we spoke to was startlingly nasty, so much so that we got the sense that everyone else in the office was rolling their eyes at her general unpleasantness, with which they were undoubtedly all too familiar.

The clerk assured us at the outset that we probably didn't have all the necessary documentation (we did), scolded us for our (correctly filled-out) paperwork, and lectured us ad nauseam that the judge presiding over our ceremony would undoubtedly fill out his part of the license in blue ink instead of black, rendering the whole thing invalid and our union an utter sham. Kate assured her that the judge presiding over our ceremony was the chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, so he probably had the various legalities covered. This sounds like a flex, but Judge Wathen is a longtime friend of Kate's family, and besides, this clerk was being a colossal pill. In any case, she was unimpressed, and with great reluctance, she notarized our paperwork and sent us on our way.

Now, Kennebunkport is a big tourist town. I'm sure many couples "from away" apply for marriage licenses there, and I have no doubt that many of those couples are insufferable. But Kate and I are both Maine-born and pleasant as pie, so this clerk's general attitude towards us was baffling. Some people just want to make the world as miserable as they are, I guess.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/9/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 136th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

The last several secrets have been about my wife Kate, and so is this one.

Pretty early on in our relationship, she went home to visit her parents for the weekend. On her second night away, while I was in the middle of watching the movie "Sneakers" on TV, Kate called me and told me that the video store in her parents' town was going out of business. (Netflix was in its infancy, but the shockwaves were beginning to be felt.) She said she had bought me two movies on VHS at their going-out-of-business sale. (This was back when people still had VCRs.)

"What movies?" I said.

"I want it to be a surprise," she said.

"Well, let me ask you this," I said. "Does either of these movies have Peter Falk in it?" I didn't have any particular reason to ask that. Neither of us had previously disclosed to the other a deep and abiding love for Peter Falk (though, like all right-thinking people, I do have a deep and abiding love for Peter Falk). I just thought it was a funny, random question to ask.

"I'm not going to answer any questions," said Kate, and when she came home, she revealed that she'd gotten me "Tune In Tomorrow," the 1990 comedy starring Keanu Reeves, Barbara Hershey, Elizabeth McGovern, and, yes, Peter Falk. She was somewhat miffed that I had proffered such a spectacularly spot-on guess.

(The other movie she'd gotten me was "Sneakers.")

I've always thought that this story demonstrates how tuned into each other we were. (I've also always thought it was hilarious.)

Anyway, today is our 21st wedding anniversary. So: Happy anniversary, my love.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/10/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 137th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I used to work with a local talk radio show host, simulcasting his show on television and posting selected video segments of his show to the TV station's website. One day on his show, this fellow (let's call him Mr. Popular) repeatedly expressed the opinion that our society would be better off and safer if everyone carried a concealed weapon. He also managed to mention in passing that he and his family would be attending the local county fair the next evening.

A member of the audience then sent the following email, which, because of the nature of my job, found its way to me before anyone else:

"I am taking my gun to the fair. Hope it doesn't miss fire [sic] and hit your kid."

It seemed likely to me that this fine citizen was making a perhaps good point badly. You know, something like:

"If everyone carried a weapon, then the likelihood of mishaps and tragedies, including ones involving your loved ones, would increase dramatically."

Which would have been a perfectly fair point, if he'd put it that way. But he didn't put it that way. As written, it seemed to creep right up to the threshold of threat, and maybe even scoot over it. I figured it was in all probability an idiot blowing off steam, but, because it mentioned Mr. Popular's kid, and because it mentioned a specific place Mr. Popular was going to be, I felt like I needed to report it. So, I called the police, and I called Mr. Popular to let him know what was going on.

Neither the police nor Mr. Popular seemed all that concerned. Mr. Popular was remarkably nonchalant about the whole thing, and the responding officer (who for some reason needed to know my date of birth) remarked, "I'm not sure a crime has been committed." He didn't think there was anything to be done. We got Mr. Popular on the call and everyone agreed that after an incident report was filed, the matter would be dropped.

Then, on the advice of a colleague, Mr. Popular discussed the email with the chief of police of his own hometown (a smaller town, adjacent to the city in which I had originally reported the incident), and his chief seemed to think this was a SERIOUS threat, and that Mr. Popular should be talking to an actual detective, not the lowly officer who'd responded to my call. He also thought Mr. Popular should contact the sheriff's office where the fair was being held and request a security detail for his family's visit to the fair. He also thought the FBI should probably get involved. Jeepers! After that conversation, Mr. Popular went from blasé to full-on panicked.

A little while later, I got a call from a detective, who seemed annoyed and baffled to be working this case. "It's not a threat," he said emphatically when I described the situation. "It probably isn't," I answered, "but [Mr. Popular's] police chief seemed to think it was credible."

"Police chiefs don't work cases," he responded tersely.

Nevertheless, Mr. Popular received super-duper-VIP status at the county fair, getting a special parking place closer to the fairgrounds and a full security detail (uniforms and plain-clothes). Plus, everything at the fair, from the admission to the rides to the fried dough, was comped for him and his family.

It was fascinating to watch the evolution of this incident, which began with a (probably) innocuous if idiotically worded email and ended with a response typically reserved for visiting heads of state. And Mr. Popular went from shrugging off the whole thing to freaking out to reveling in the elevated perks of stardom.

And somehow, I had touched off the whole firestorm, almost certainly unnecessarily.

(At no point did anyone ever ask for the email address of the guy who had sent the allegedly threatening email.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/13/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 138th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Sometimes, you can unintentionally get caught up in someone else's crazy. Like for instance, one Saturday last fall, I was waiting in line at the Starbucks drive-through. A couple of employees seemed to be taking a break at one of the outdoor tables. They occasionally glanced at the line of cars at the drive-through (me and the car in front of me), but otherwise took no note of us. After a while, it seemed to me that the car in front of me was taking a really long time to order. Like, a really, really long time. So much so, that I finally got out of my car to see what the hold-up was. And that's when I saw a little sign taped up to the drive-through speaker: "DUE TO STAFFING SHORTAGES, STARBUCKS WILL BE CLOSED A 1 P.M. TODAY." I checked my phone. It was 1:15. "Do you know they're closed?" I said to the guy in front of me.

"No, they're not," he said.

"Did anyone take your order?" I asked him.

"I'm still waiting," he said.

"The sign right there says they're closed."

"They got employees sitting out there in front of the store," he said. So, he was making some sort of a point, I guess.

"Okay," I told him, and I got back in my car and drove away.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/15/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 139th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

On Halloween night 1992, I was supposed to go to a party being thrown by people I didn't know. But Chad Anderson and Kate Culkin were dancing around the apartment to The Lemonheads album "It's a Shame About Ray" on repeat, and I decided to join them, never actually bothering to leave for the party. This is not a decision I have ever regretted.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/17/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 140th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

A few years back, when my older son was in-patient at Boston Children's Hospital, I was sitting in a waiting room, worrying about him and waiting to speak to his care team about his treatment plan. A nurse came out, smiled at me, and asked me to come with her. I followed her to a small meeting room, in which there was a woman already seated at a conference table. The nurse introduced me to the woman (who smiled at me but said nothing) and invited me to have a seat. I did so. "Now then," said the nurse, taking a seat herself and addressing me directly, "Mrs. Rodriguez here would like to know how her daughter is doing."

I felt a dizzying sense of dislocation. I am in a Hitchcock movie, I thought, marveling at this apparent case of mistaken identity. Mrs. Rodriguez and the nurse were looking at me expectantly. "Uh," I said (because you have to start somewhere), "Who do you think I am?"

"You're the interpreter," the nurse cheerfully explained.

"No, I'm not," I told her. "My son's in the hospital. I was waiting to speak to someone about him."

"They told me the interpreter was out there," she admonished, as if it were suddenly my fault.

"Maybe so," I said. "But I'm not him."

"You're not supposed to be in here," she said.

"I'm sure I'm not."

"You'll have to go back to the waiting room."

"That's fine."

I went back to the waiting room and discovered that the people I was supposed to be talking to had been looking for me, and where had I wandered off to anyway?

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/19/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 141st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

For my 21st birthday (32 years ago today), my dad and my stepmom and my mom all took me out to dinner, an event arranged with great ceremony by my dad. At the end of the meal, he handed me a small wrapped box and told me it was my present. "I hope you don't have one," he said. I opened it. It was a car key on a keychain emblazoned with my first initial: "G."

This is how dumb I am: I thought: Huh, he's giving me a [semi-personalized] keychain. "Thanks," I said, quarter-heartedly. My dad looked crestfallen, and I thought, Whatever, dude. You gave me a keychain. "What, are you giving me your car?" I asked, sarcastically.

"Yeah," he said (sarcastically, I assumed).

Later, driving home from the restaurant, I said, "Wait a minute. Are you giving me your car?"

He was.

Anyway, that's how dumb I am.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/20/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 142nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

The summer I turned ten, I spent six weeks in a dorm room in Bozeman, Montana, with my aunt Patty and my mom (Joanne Tulonen), who was taking a course at Montana State University. It being summer, we usually had the dorm room windows open, and since the dorm room was high up in a student housing tower, the wind sometimes blew through the room something fierce.

One day, I was eating from a bowl of cherries in another student's room. (It was a pretty chummy hall, and I was a cute kid, if you can believe that, one who liked the company of adults; I was in and out of many other people's rooms the entire time we were there.) I remember I was enjoying those cherries immensely, so sweet and tart and juicy.

After a while I went back to our room to get something, and a huge gust of wind came through the window as I walked in, slamming the door shut with a terrific bang. I took a few steps, glanced down, and saw that my right hand was covered in blood. For one dislocating moment, I tried to convince myself that it was just cherry juice, but the very tip of my middle finger was gone, sliced off by the door.

To this day, I don't eat cherries. Even the sight of cherries makes me a little sick to my stomach.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/22/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 143rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was 16, I borrowed my dad's car and drove into town (Amherst, Massachusetts), whereupon I promptly locked the keys in the car. At that point in my life, I hadn't been driving for very long, and I was not at all used to having to solve problems on my own. But what could I do? I had my dad's car, so I couldn't exactly call him and ask him to come help me. So, I walked to the police station and explained my situation to the desk sergeant.

"Here," he said, handing me a slim jim, the locksmith tool used to unlock car doors. He gave me a quick verbal lesson on how to break into cars, and sent me on my way. "Just bring it back, okay?" he said. And five minutes later, having gotten back into my dad's car, I did.

I think of this story every time I hear someone say white privilege isn't real.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/24/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 144th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Years ago, we had only one cat, and she was getting older, so we started thinking that it might be time to get another cat. I asked my younger child (who was three years old at the time) if they thought we should get a cat, and they immediately replied, "Yes! As long as it's a dog."

(Years later, that exchange became fodder for my webcomic, "Actual Conversations With My Sons")

That night, we went on the Humane Society website and found a one-year-old cat up for adoption who was already named "Dog," which, you know, seemed like kismet.

The Humane Society was thrilled at our interest, because it's hard to place older cats when there are very cute little kittens available. In fact, seeing all the very cute kittens available when we walked in to meet Dog made us briefly consider getting Dog AND a brand-new kitten. But it turned out that Dog, who had been given up by a family who had been evicted from their home (which is the sad part of this story), had come in with a buddy, a six-year-old black-and-white named Dittle Boy. The two were thick as thieves, and the Humane Society told us they'd waive the adoption fee for Dittle Boy if we'd take them both, so they wouldn't be separated forever. Because we're not heartless monsters, it was impossible to say no to that, but that meant no kitten (although stay tuned for the next secret).

The only thing was, while the name "Dog" was generally well-regarded (because of the story that went along with it, and because of the the overall coolness of naming your cat "Dog"), the name "Dittle Boy" had to go, because, well, yuck. Dittle Boy? What the hell? No.

The younger child lobbied hard for "Frankie," based on a cartoon they had seen about a superhero Frankenstein. The older child championed "Ben 10," after an actually-pretty-cool animated sci-fi show on the Cartoon Network. I liked "Bogart" (because he was black & white—get it?). Then, the older child changed his mind and decided he wanted to name it "Kevin 10" (a reference to a character in the aforementioned "Ben 10"). Nothing else would do, he insisted. Kate suggested a compromise, "Bogart 10," which was embraced by all. ("Bogart" for short.)¹

After Dittle Boy's name was successfully changed, a great lobbying commenced to change Dog's name to "Super Cat." Kate suggested a compromise, "Dog the Super Cat," which was embraced by all. ("Dog" for short.)

Bogart fell madly in love with Kate, and stayed as close to her as physically possible for the rest of his life, snuggling up to her when she was sitting on the couch, and reclining across her neck when she was lying down in bed. He died while curled up at her side, twelve years after we brought him home.

I've never seen a cat that so adored a human (except maybe our current cat Bagel, with me), and it still blows my mind that he only came into our lives because my child said, "As long as it's a dog."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹What I love about these "compromises" is how I got the names I wanted for both cats, but in both cases, Kate made it seem like it was a family decision. Those are the parenting jiu-jitsu skills of which Kate is a master.

6/27/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 145th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the previous secret, I revealed how we came by the cats Dog and Bogart (né Dittle Boy). For those of you keeping score, that brought us up to three cats, which is one more than I had bargained for when we had gone down to the Humane Society.

One night, shortly after we got Dog and Bogart, about 90 seconds after Kate and I had gone to bed, Kate was waking me out of a sound sleep. (I guess I'd been tired.) She thought one of our cats was in trouble because of a repeated loud and unhappy-sounding meow coming from downstairs. I got up and checked, but the cats were fine.

The next day, Kate called me at work to tell me that the meowing we'd heard had been coming from a stray kitten who had made camp beneath our house. And this is what she said to me next:

"We brought her inside, and she's BEAUTIFUL. She seems to love it here. And the kids already adore her, and it's [the older boy's] birthday today, and he said that this cat could be his present, and also his friend. [long pause] Anyway, I told them it was YOUR decision whether or not we keep her."

And that's how we came to have four cats instead of three.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/29/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 146th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once tried to show my kids the Jack Black movie "School of Rock," but after about fifteen minutes, they both professed to be bored silly and asked if we could stop. So, we stopped, but a couple of weeks later I heard them referencing a scene in that movie that occurred after we had turned it off. I asked them how they knew about that scene, and my older son said, "Oh, we went back and watched the whole movie later. It was good!"

The little fuckers.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/30/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 147th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Thirty-two years ago today, my aunt Patty got married. The night before her wedding, we had a rehearsal dinner, and in the middle of the rehearsal dinner, I noticed, from across the banquet hall, that Patty was quietly crying. I told my mother (Joanne Tulonen), who got up to go find out what was wrong. I was far too far away to hear them, but I could clearly see my mother put a comforting hand on Patty's shoulder, and I could clearly see Patty tell her something, and I could clearly see my mother glance over at me, very quickly, and then go back to comforting Patty. Then my uncle David went over to find out what was the matter. Patty told him, and just like my mother, David quickly glanced over at me, and then also began comforting Patty. One by one, family members (Debbie, Bill, Carleton, Carolyn, Peg, etc.) kept going up to Patty to see what was wrong, and every time anybody found out what was wrong, they'd glance directly at me and then quickly look away.

As it happens, I'd forgotten to pack my belt for this trip, so I was wearing a jacket and tie, but my pants were sadly beltless. Somehow, I convinced myself that THIS was what had Patty in such a state. How could I ruin her beautiful day (and rehearsal day) by not wearing a belt? What kind of classless ass was I, anyway? What an oaf! I couldn't imagine what else it could be.

Well, believe it or not, it wasn't the belt (or lack thereof). I was giving a reading at the wedding, you see, and Patty realized during the rehearsal dinner that she and Ed had gotten gifts for wedding participants, but had forgotten me—which didn't trouble me in the slightest when I found out about it, of course.

Anyway, happy anniversary, Patty and Ed. (I'm sorry about the belt.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/4/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 148th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Once, many years ago, I was waiting with some friends in an outdoor line for a movie for which we had already purchased tickets. We'd been early, so we were first in line, which got rather long, wrapping around the side of the building and around the block. As the theater doors were about to open, I noticed that latecomers were buying their tickets and just sort of clustering near us on the sidewalk, not exactly cutting in line, but just hovering near the entrance. They were obviously hoping to drift in with the first people in line when we were finally allowed inside. Annoyed by these potential line-cutters, I said to my friends (not trying to be overheard, just making conversation), "If my dad were here, he'd tell those people" —and here I adopted his fierce, authoritative voice—"'All you people get to the back of the line!'"

I looked up, and all those people were going to the back of the line.

And I thought: Whoa! This is how my dad feels all the time!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

UPDATE 2025: I told this story (as part of a longer piece) at Stories Told Live, a monthly storytelling event featuring real people with real stories, told live with no notes in front of an audience at Blue Portland Maine.

7/6/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 149th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My go-to hangman word, if I'm the hangman, is "zephyr," because it's really hard to guess. But I guess I just blew it for ever playing hangman with any of you.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/8/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 150th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the summer of 1990, when the Warren Beatty movie "Dick Tracy" was playing in theaters, Chad Anderson and I used to go through the McDonald's drive-through every morning on the way to work and ask for "two Dick Tracy game pieces please" and nothing else. We could see the annoyance on the employees' faces when we pulled up to the window to collect our tickets, but rules are rules. By law, customers cannot be compelled to buy anything in order to play games like these, and we were playing to win (top prize was a million dollars). The funny thing is, I can't remember us ever winning anything, not so much as a free side of fries, which probably served us right, but seems somewhat statistically suspect.

Speaking of which, that same summer, we were working in a kitchen that served canned Pepsi products, and Pepsi was running a contest which (supposedly) had prizes printed on the inside bottom of their cans. As employees, we were free to drink as many cans of Pepsi as we liked, but neither of us ever won so much as a free can of soda (which admittedly would have been a somewhat redundant prize, but nevertheless). Contest rules stated that one in ten cans was a winner, but we never won a damned thing, and we must have made our way through hundreds of cans over the course of the summer. We got so frustrated, we called the Pepsi customer service line to complain about the statistical improbability of our lack of wins. They offered to send us a list of winners, which we agreed we'd like to see, but we never received such a list.

I think maybe the soda corroded away the ink used to print the prizes on the bottom of the cans, and nobody actually won anything as a result, but I can't get anybody else on board for that theory.

Anyway, that's the story of how, despite our best efforts, Chad and I didn't win anything in the summer of 1990.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/11/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 151st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Years ago, working at a customer service call center, I received a very angry call from a man complaining about receiving mail from us that was addressed to him but clearly not meant for him, and what kind of idiot factory were we running anyway? I looked him up and realized that his adult son, who was also a customer, lived with him and was a "Jr." (though the suffix was not included in our correspondence).The mail in question was meant for his son, of course, but privacy guidelines prevented me from explaining this clearly, so I had to walk him through the logic, hoping he'd be able to figure it out for himself. "Is there anyone else in your household who might be receiving mail from us?"; "Is it possible you've opened someone else's mail?"; "Do you know anyone who has the same name as you?" etc. He didn't get it, and I feel like anyone so completely confounded by this particular situation probably shouldn't have named a child after himself.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/13/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 152nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When the New England Patriots played in the 2002 Super Bowl, my dad was so keyed up and emotionally invested, he had to watch it all alone. He just couldn't bear to be in the same room as anybody else, in case they lost. When the Patriots returned to the Super Bowl two years later, he was much more relaxed, and he invited a bunch of people to come watch at his house, promising to make Buffalo chicken wings for the occasion. I told him not to bother to make blue cheese dip, because I had a great recipe for blue cheese dip and I would bring the blue cheese dip myself. But he forgot this, naturally, and ended up making his own blue cheese dip—which was fine; we just served both dips. After sampling them, my dad remarked, in all sincerity: "Huh. Mine's actually better."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/15/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 153rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When my mother (Joanne Tulonen) and I moved from Montana back to New England when I was 17, we rented a moving truck, into which we put a lot of our stuff, and the truck would be towing a giant wooden trailer built by my grandfather (Carleton Finch), into which we put the rest of our stuff, including my desk (also built by my grandfather). I hadn't emptied the drawers of my desk into boxes; there didn't seem to be any point to that. So, all of my desk drawer stuff was still in my desk drawers for the duration of the move.

I wasn't at my grandparents' house in Massachusetts when the trailer was unloaded, but there'd been some water leakage, so my mother, to make sure nothing was damaged, opened all my desk drawers and removed their contents, which included (among the pens and pencils and random paper) a couple boxes of condoms (an obscure off-brand called "Love Gaskets"). This was in front of my entire family—aunts, uncles, and grandparents, and I can't tell you how glad I am that I wasn't there for this.

But when I did arrive at the house, a few hours later, I could not figure out why everybody (especially Debbie Finch) was smirking at me.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/18/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 154th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once bought (among several items) a bottle of melatonin at the grocery store. It was there in my cart when I checked out (in the self-checkout aisle), but after I finished scanning my items and completing my transaction on the PIN pad, it was nowhere to be found. I searched the entire bagging area, the floor around the bagging area, and everywhere else I could think of, with no luck. I flagged down an employee and relayed my dilemma, showing her the melatonin clearly printed on my receipt, and the clear absence of melatonin among my groceries. She suggested that I go grab another bottle, but I explained to her that I had actually gotten the last one in the store, so she said that I could go up to the service desk and get a refund, which I did, telling my sad sorry story all over again to the customer service clerk. And as the customer service clerk was handing over my refund—at that exact moment—I put my hand into my coat pocket and realized the bottle of melatonin had been there all along.

(As previously mentioned in Greg Tulonen Secrets, I like coats with lots of pockets.)

Now, ethically, I should have refused the money and explained my mistake, but my deep mortification over the fuss I had just put up won out, so I accepted the money and left as quickly as I could.

My brush with crime.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/20/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 155th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Kate and I were driving someplace one night, and I accidentally cut a guy off. He honked his horn angrily, and I raised my hand apologetically, but that gesture apparently wasn't enough for him, because he started tailgating us, very close. So, I pulled over to the side of the road to let him pass, and he pulled over right behind us, his headlights on bright, which, you know, is the "oh shit" moment in this kind of encounter. Like, are people going to be reading about us in tomorrow's paper?

We pulled back into traffic, and he pulled in right behind us, staying right on our tail wherever we went. We took four successive left turns in the hopes of shaking him, but he took those four successive left turns right along with us.

Finally, Kate suggested that we drive to the nearest police station, a strategy she herself had employed once under similar circumstances (though in her case, her tailgater had turned out to be a cop, so really, she had just provided him with a civilian escort to his work).

So, that's what we did. We drove to the nearest police station, this guy tailgating us the entire way, clearly not realizing where we were headed. When we pulled into the station's parking lot, he did an abrupt U-turn in the road and sped away. So, whatever this fellow's intentions—scare us or hurt us—they were thwarted by this one simple maneuver.

(She's a smart cookie, my wife.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/22/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 156th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My mother (Joanne Tulonen) and I didn't fight a lot when I was a teenager, but I do remember one morning when we were sniping at each other a little. I can't really remember what it was about (well, I can actually, but it's too stupid to relay), but I'm pretty sure I was being kind of a shit in that way that teenage boys can sometimes be. In exasperation, my mother said, "Fuck you," and walked away.

Which was fine. I mean, not fine exactly, and not at all typical, but certainly understandable. After we'd both cooled off, all would be well.

The only problem was that my first class of the day was English, and my English teacher was my mother. I got to class early and whispered to my friends Louis and Carolyn what my mother had just said to me.

"Ms. Tulonen," Louis immediately called out to my mother. "Did you really say eff you to Greg this morning?"

She copped to it at once. My mother is no liar, and my classmates all thought that was hilarious.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/25/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 157th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the early '90s, when I was living in New York, I took a vacation to California, and while I was there, I attended a taping of "The Price Is Right" (not the one with Drew Carey; the old school version with Bob Barker at the helm). Fun fact: They make it seem like they're picking audience members at random to "come on down!" but actually, each and every audience member is interviewed by a producer before entering the studio, with the most telegenic invariably being chosen to compete. I was not selected, of course, but I'm briefly on camera in the audience, urging a contestant to bid one dollar.

While I was waiting in line for the taping, I—in a spectacularly uncharacteristic move—chatted up one of the pages, giving her my phone number and inviting her to give me a call if she was ever in New York—which, astonishingly enough, she did three weeks later.

I took her to an East Village club called Lucky Cheng's, staffed exclusively by Asian trans women and drag queens—truly a tourist-friendly New York City walk on the wild side. After a very late night of dancing and assorted revelry, we went our separate ways and I never saw her again.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/27/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 158th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once worked with a guy whose initials were JEW. How do I know this? I know this because he wrote "JEW" on all the food he kept in the fridge (frozen Lean Pockets meals, mostly). Until I figured out what it was all about, I thought maybe there was some weird antisemitic branding conspiracy afoot inside our company refrigerator.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/29/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 159th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When Chad Anderson and I got an apartment together in New York, we went out and purchased a sofa. After we made our selection, the store owner took us aside and told us, in a thick Middle Eastern accent: "I must explain something to you about this sofa. It is not a bed. Do you understand me? It is just a sofa." At this point, I thought he was admonishing us that sofas were for sitting on, not sleeping on, like he cared about what our personal habits would be with his furniture. But he continued: "It does not pull out into a bed, like some sofas do. Do not come back here next week and tell me that it is not a bed because I'm telling you now: It is not a bed."

We assured him that that was fine, and now we had an amusing anecdote to relay to friends who came over to the apartment. "The sofa is not a bed," we'd advise them, especially if they were sleeping over. Our friend John stayed with us for a few weeks while he was looking for a job and an apartment, and he slept every night scrunched up on our sofa, because as we all knew, it did not pull out into a bed.

Then one night, after Chad had gone to bed, I was tugging on the couch cushion for some reason, and to my enormous shock, it pulled out into a futon-style bed. "Chad!" I shouted. "Our sofa pulls out into a bed!"

"No, it doesn't," he responded, rather crankily. (To be fair, he'd been asleep.)

"Come here!" I insisted.

So, he came out of his room and discovered, as I just had, that our sofa pulled out into a bed. We considered going back to the furniture store to tell the owner that in fact our sofa WAS a bed, but by that time the store had gone out of business, perhaps because it had been disseminating erroneous information about its own products.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/1/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 160th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When my younger child was four years old, I had a weird dream that they were not actually my child, but rather a trained assassin who'd been embedded with my family over the previous four years with the ultimate goal of taking me out. (Why it would take that long is beyond me. The kid could have dispatched me years earlier with a butter knife while I slept if they were so inclined.)

This truth was revealed to me (in the dream) as I was driving they somewhere, and the kid, in the car seat behind me, suddenly wrapped their legs around my neck and began strangling me as I drove. (This would never have worked in real life. Their legs weren't long enough. However, they did enjoy kicking the back of my seat with great vigor.)

In the dream, as I came to understand the nature of their status (and as the life slowly drained out of me), I still tried to assert some parental control: "Stop that right now or you can't play on the Wii tonight!"

I told Kate about this dream the next morning over the phone as she drove the kids to school. They overheard enough of her end of the conversation to demand to know what she'd been talking about. So she told them a watered-down version of the dream, which they found hilarious.

Of course they did.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/3/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 161st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Today's secret arrives in video form.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/5/2022

Hello, and welcome to the 162nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

The first time I ever saw "The Wizard of Oz," I assumed, after they sang "Lions and tigers and bears—oh my!" and then subsequently ran into the Cowardly Lion, that it was only logical that they would next run into a tiger and a bear. I was just a little kid, but I understood foreshadowing, or at least I thought I did. But that was one Chekhov's tiger (and bear—oh my!) that never went off.

And that will do it for season two of "Greg Tulonen Secrets." I honestly don't know if there will be a season three, but thanks for reading.

3/14/2023

Hello, and welcome to the 163rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My cat Bagel knows with absolute certainty when it's 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. (her usual feeding times) every single day. If I'm sleeping or otherwise occupied at 6 a.m. and/or 9 p.m., she gives me a little swat on the nose. Even when we change clocks for Daylight Saving Time, she somehow knows exactly when it's 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. (on the dot). It's uncanny.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/16/23

Hello, and welcome to the 164th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My college friend Eric Winick had a column in the campus paper called "Mindless Ramblings," collecting his smart-aleck musings on the events of the day. He also adopted the alter ego Edna Welthorpe (Mrs.) to write a letter to the editor complaining about one of his own columns. He swiped this move from British playwright Joe Orton, who used to write letters to the local paper, denouncing his plays under the fictional Welthorpe's name, in order to drum up controversy over (and publicity for) his productions. Eric's Welthorpe letter was published in the campus paper under the headline "Winick Irritates."

What Eric did not anticipate, but what in fact did happen next, was that his fake letter would inspire other (real) people to pile onto the "Winick Irritates" bandwagon, writing their own (real) letters to the paper, complaining about his allegedly irritating column. The best-laid plans, am I right? Anyway, this is where I come into the story.

In those days, college kids used to make extra money by printing up t-shirts with clever sayings or quirky graphics, and selling them door-to-door in various dorms. There was no internet, so you couldn't use a website to create these shirts. You had to work with a local printer to create a silkscreen. I thought it would be funny to capitalize on the burgeoning anti-Winick craze by creating "Winick Irritates" t-shirts. My friend Jim Nida and I went over to Eric's room, and under some flimsy pretense, took a whole roll of pictures of him on black-and-white film. We then designed our shirt, with the "Winick Irritates" headline printed in small letters over the left breast, and an anti-Winick logo (seen here) on the back. Over time, we got pictures of people wearing these shirts at various historical landmarks. Like this one, taken in New York City in 1990. That's me in the t-shirt, standing next to Chad Anderson and Scott Westerbeke. (The base of the Statue of Liberty can be seen in the background, as can the World Trade Center towers.)

Look, I'm not a complete asshole. We printed only a very small batch of shirts, we (mostly) made sure to sell them only to people who actually liked Eric, and we gave Eric his own shirt for free. Eric himself was rather nonplussed by the whole endeavor, and as far as I know, will remain nonplussed about it until he figures out exactly what nonplussed means.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/21/23

Hello, and welcome to the 165th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once stayed overnight in a house in which the living room footstools were shaped like giant teeth, and heads of animals the homeowner had killed lined the walls—deer, elk, mountain goats, bobcats, and on and on. This was in Abilene, Texas, and the homeowner was a dentist, which is not important to this story, though it does make the footstools shaped like giant teeth slightly less creepy (but only slightly). A plaque under one deer head read, "This deer was gored by a six-point buck after it was shot," which seems like a linguistic ambiguity to me: Did it mean that the deer was shot, and then happened to be gored by a passing buck, or that the BUCK was shot, and then gored this particular deer in its death throes?

I may never know.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/23/23

Hello, and welcome to the 166th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In grad school, Kate and I were asked to help a friend move from one communal house to another.

When we arrived at her old place, we found things in disarray, with very few items actually packed yet, and no empty boxes available to do any additional packing. "I thought we could just unpack the first load at the new house and then use those boxes to pack the second load," our friend explained—which, I mean, if that's how you want to live your life... okay... I guess.

So Kate and I and one of the housemates loaded up our cars and headed to the new house, which was empty and locked.

"Do you have the key?" we asked our new companion. For the purposes of this story, let's call him Gary. That's not his real name, I don't think. Actually, I can't remember his real name. But for story purposes, he'll be Gary from now on. (I just checked with Kate to make sure his name wasn't actually Gary. It wasn't.)

"I don't have the key," Gary told us. "The landlady is going to meet us here with the key."

"When?" we asked him.

"I don't know."

"You didn't set a time?"

"I just know she's meeting us here sometime today," he said. "We can wait. Let's bring the boxes onto the porch, okay?"

So, we brought the boxes onto the porch. But waiting isn't exactly my best thing, so while Kate and Gary sat on the porch surrounded by boxes, I took a little stroll around the property. On the other side of the house, I found an unlocked window. I opened it and scuttled through, as nimble as a very clumsy cheetah, and went to unlock the door by which Kate and Gary were sitting. "Want to start bringing boxes in?" I asked, feeling triumphant.

Kate was thrilled; Gary, less so. "You broke in?" he asked me, incredulous.

"Well, yeah."

"I don't think we ought to be breaking in," he said.

"This is your place," I reminded him. "You've already put down a security deposit and first month's rent. This place is yours, starting today."

"Not until the landlady gets here with the key," he insisted.

"I'm pretty sure it doesn't say that on the lease," I argued. "Your rental agreement has a start date, and that start date is today."

Gary was mulish. "Even so," he said, "I think I'd prefer to wait for the landlady."

"Who's coming you don't know when."

"That's right."

"Okay," I said, and took a seat next to Kate, feeling aggrieved.

That feeling of aggrievement was in no way eased by Gary, who began sighing and muttering about our situation. "This is so frustrating," he said at one point. "I'm not built for this."

After a pause, he added: "I'm a doer."

("I'm a doer" has become an in-joke between Kate and me, busted out whenever we encounter someone who could be doing something useful, but isn't.)

"I'll tell you what," I said. "You wait here for the landlady, and Kate and I will go find some empty boxes to bring back to your old place."

So, that's what we did. Except I think we stopped to have a little breakfast first.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/28/23

Hello, and welcome to the 167th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I got to college, voicemail was in its infancy. In fact, it was so new, the term "voicemail" hadn't fully caught on yet. (My school called it "phone mail.") Every student had their own extension, and when you dialed it, you'd get an automated message that said, "You have reached the phone mailbox of [student's name]."

The phone mail lady's voice was generic and flat, almost robotic¹, but the student's name was spoken by someone local, hired by the school to read off everybody's name for that piece of the greeting.

If she mispronounced your name (which she absolutely did for "Tulonen"), there was a phone number you could call and leave a message to request a redo. My friend Jim Nida called our freshman year to have the "James" in his name shortened to "Jim," and to have the pronunciation of "Nida" (which had been mispronounced as "Needa") corrected.

I waited a while (like, three years), and then called that number back, pretending to be Jim, and claimed that my name had been mispronounced, that it was actually pronounced "Needa" and that furthermore, I went by "Jimmy." So for a while there during our senior year, while Jim was interviewing for internships and whatnot, his voicemail (sorry, "phone mail") greeting indicated that the caller had reached "Jimmy Needa."

Jim tried to get me back by calling that same number, pretending to be me, and claiming that my name was actually pronounced "Tulonenen" (note the extra "en"), and that I went by the nickname "Skippy."

I should mention that to cut down on this sort of prank, the college preferred that pronunciation change request messages come from within your own phone mail account, so it would be tagged as a message specifically from you. I was able to do this from Jim's account, because I easily guessed his password ("JIM"). However, when Jim tried it with me, he had no way of getting into my account, so he tried a cold call. This raised some red flags with the poor soul charged with retrieving these messages, who called me to confirm, which I declined to do.

And so Jim's revenge plan was foiled, but years later, when I was a groomsman at his wedding, he gave me as a groomsman's gift an L.L. Bean travel bag emblazoned with the name "Skippy." (After nearly a quarter of a century, I'm still using it.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Nevertheless, the phone mail lady did inspire the song, "Smooth Operator," by the college band, The Jesus Cricket. Sample lyric: "You may transfer out of phone mail / I think I'll transfer out of life / 'Cause I'm in love with the phone mail lady / But I can't make her my wife"

3/30/23

Hello, and welcome to the 168th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was a junior in college, an annoying freshman approached me and said, "Greg, I just discovered an author I know you're gonna love. His name's Richard Brautigan."

"Yeah," I said, as nonchalantly as possible, "I've met him."

"No you haven't," he insisted, suddenly vexed.

"I have, actually."

"But he's dead!"

"True, but he hasn't ALWAYS been dead. I met him back when he was alive."

I wasn't lying. On Thanksgiving night, 1982, after our holiday meal, I had gone with my mother and the guy she was seeing to the Fraternal Order of the Eagles Club in Bozeman, Montana, where we encountered Brautigan sitting alone at a table. The guy my mom was seeing was acquainted with Brautigan, who invited us all to join him. I had just read Brautigan's "Trout Fishing in America" and been knocked out by his pranksterish metafictional hijinks. He was extremely drunk that night, slurring his words and gesturing clumsily, but I was enthralled.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/4/23

Hello, and welcome to the 169th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I have been punched in the face exactly once in my life. It happened when I was ten years old, playing four square at summer camp. At the very start of the game, I bobbled my serve and called for a do-over, to which one of my opponents (who was quite a bit bigger) objected.

"Give me the ball," he demanded, and I took immediate evasive action, mainly in the form of running away with the ball as fast as I could. When he caught up to me, he knocked me down, took the ball, and punched me square in the face, hard enough to draw blood, just above my left eye.

Sobbing and clutching my face, I called him a "motherfucker," which was the first time I'd ever called anybody that. I'd come to understand that this was the absolute worst thing you could call someone, as it involved the person's mother. I still remember that in the fraction of a second before I unleashed the nuclear expletive, I internally debated whether or not it was appropriate, and instantly decided that the situation was severe enough to warrant it.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/6/23

Hello, and welcome to the 170th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once ate at a barbecue restaurant in Somerville, Massachusetts, where patrons ate at long, communal, picnic-style tables. I was there with a friend, and we sat across from each other, a little ways down the table from a couple on a date. As we were leaving, the guy followed me out of the restaurant and said, "Excuse me."

I turned around on the sidewalk. The guy was staring me down, his arms cocked back, his chest pushed forward, as if he were cradling an invisible broom behind his back.

"Yeah?" I said.

He leaned towards me. "You got something you want to say to my girlfriend?"

"Excuse me?"

"The way you were checking her out, I thought maybe she was your long lost sister."

I'll pause the narrative here to consider a couple of things I COULD have said in this situation, but (wisely) did not.

For example, when he said, "You got something you want to say to my girlfriend?" I could have said, "Yeah. Tell her when she gets tired of insecure losers to give me a call, okay?"

Or when he said, "The way you were checking her out, I thought maybe she was your long lost sister," I could have said, "Huh. Is that how you think about your own sister?"

I didn't say either of those things. Instead, I just raised my hands, palms forward, and said sorry, then turned around and continued down the sidewalk, hoping he wouldn't follow. (He didn't.)

Meanwhile, my friend was completely baffled about whatever that had been.

As a postscript, I once told this story at a party, and it turned out that someone else at the party had had the exact same experience in the exact same restaurant, but for whatever reason, he seemed unimpressed by this coincidence.

(Full disclosure: I had totally been checking out that guy's girlfriend.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/10/23

Hello, and welcome to the 171st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

The Thanksgiving of my freshman year in college, I brought my friend Jim Nida home because he was "orphaned" on campus. At my grandparents' house after the holiday meal, we were all sitting around the family room when my grandfather (Carleton Finch, a.k.a. Zeke, a.k.a. Grampy) began talking to Jim about potatoes (varieties, shapes, sizes, harvest seasons, etc.). Gradually, one by one, family members (myself included) casually got up from where we were sitting and slinked into the kitchen, but poor Jim was left behind, too polite to abandon what turned out to be a two-and-a-half-hour lecture on potatoes.

At this point, I'll pause my rendition of this oft-told family legend to offer a rebuttal proffered by Grampy the last time this story came up:

"Poetic license may improve the literary quality of a story, but two-and-a-half hours? Please. It was perhaps half an hour, AND it took place after Jim asked me a question that indicated his lack of basic knowledge about the subject."

I'll also allow Jim to weigh in on the matter. Here's what he had to say, when the true length of Grampy's potato lecture was in dispute:

"I'm not sure how long it was, but it was longer than your 'garden variety' potato conversation. Zeke really did list out each type of potato, with some identifying characteristics, and when I thought he was about done, he started going through them again. I'm pretty sure we were outside for part of it, but we ended up in the family room, where everybody else did slink away—slink is the exact right word for it. To this day, I cannot eat any potato dish at Thanksgiving without remembering my time with Grampy Zeke. I've even asked job candidates, 'How many varieties of potatoes are there?' just to see how they think. (Mostly, they think the interview is ridiculous.) Greg's family was quite welcoming and certainly generous with information of all sorts, and I look back fondly on that trip. Having been to many Thanksgivings since then across a decent number of families, I have found that most families have a Zeke—maybe he's a great uncle or a cousin or something else, but a great American archetype: the guy who just knows everything about something, whatever it may be."

All of which is a preface to saying that today is Zeke's 100th birthday. He's still sharp as a tack and plenty knowledgeable. Happy birthday, Grampy! I love you more than I can say, and welcome anything you have to tell me, about potatoes or anything else.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/13/23

Hello, and welcome to the 172nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One summer at summer camp, when I was nine or ten years old, the camp counselors and administration made a big deal about an upcoming Swedish holiday the camp would be celebrating: Köttbullen Svensson Day, which, we were told, honors the great Swedish citizen, Köttbullen Svensson. There were posters and activities and games and contests, all in anticipation of the big day, but no explanation of what Köttbullen Svensson was famous for in Swedish history.

At last, Köttbullen Svensson Day arrived, and the camp was honored by a visit from Köttbullen Svensson himself (actually played by camp counselor Ewa Friman), who explained through a translator that his claim to fame was inventing the Swedish meatball, and that in fact, that's where the word "meatball" came from—because, as it turns out, "köttbullen" is Swedish for "meatball."

So, yeah, Köttbullen Svensson Day was a hoax, but a pretty funny one.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/18/23

Hello, and welcome to the 173rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Sometime in the mid-'90s, I wrote the following letter to Jeff McMahan. (For some reason, I kept a copy of it, perhaps because I was charmed by my own wit.)

𝗗𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗝𝗲𝗳𝗳:

𝗜'𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗕𝗼𝗯 𝗗𝘆𝗹𝗮𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗶𝘇𝗲𝘀 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝗹𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘃𝗼𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗿𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗲, 𝘀𝗼 𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘆 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗮 𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲. 𝗛𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗲 𝗮𝘀𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗵𝗶𝗺𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 (𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲): "𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗰 𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗜 𝗿𝗲𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗲 𝗮 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗱? 𝗜𝗳 𝗜 𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴, '𝘂𝗻𝗻𝗻𝗻𝗻𝗻𝗻...,' 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻 '𝘂𝗻𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗻'? 𝗖𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗰 𝗶𝘁𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘆 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴? 𝗜𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘁 𝗺𝘆 𝗹𝘆𝗿𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗜 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗱, 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗿 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗺𝘆 𝗼𝘄𝗻?" 𝗔𝗿𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝘀𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲. 𝗗𝘆𝗹𝗮𝗻 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗲 𝗮 𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝘅.

𝗦𝗶𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆, 𝗜 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆. 𝗔𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗴𝗴𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝗶𝗹𝘆 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗹𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘀𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗸𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘄, 𝗜 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗲𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗲𝗻𝗷𝗼𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗷𝗼𝗯 𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝗹𝗮𝘄𝘆𝗲𝗿, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗿𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗿𝘂𝗶𝘁 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀, 𝗼𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗮 𝗱𝗿𝘂𝗶𝗱.

𝗡𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗮𝘃𝗼𝗿𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗻 𝗮𝗿𝗲, 𝗜 𝘄𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗴𝗼𝗱𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗲𝗱.

𝗟𝗼𝘃𝗲,
𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗴

(I'm delightful, aren't I?)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/20/23

Hello, and welcome to the 174th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I've shared a video of this incident before, but sadly, that video has been lost to the cyber-afterlife (unless Jeff Hobbs can find a way to resurrect it from Advance Digital's ancient internet burial grounds, which is doubtful). I'll do my best here to describe the incident in words.

This concerns my back-to-back encounters with Peter Tork (of "The Monkees") and Peter Scolari (of "Bosom Buddies"). Both Peters are dead now, and I was truly sorry to learn of Scolari's passing.

This is what happened: In the early 2000s, I worked as the entertainment editor for the website MassLive, and among my duties was writing and maintaining a movie-themed blog called "Movie Boy." So, when a local filmmaker was screening his new film (which happened to star both Tork and Scoarli, both of whom would be present for the premiere), it was decided that I would provide on-camera coverage of the event.

I deliberately used the passive voice in that last sentence, because it certainly wasn't my idea to provide on-camera coverage. I had no desire to stand in front of a camera and talk to people, suffering as I do from such extreme stage fright. Recall the hysterical blindness I experienced that time at an open mic.¹

But the decision was made, so off I trudged to the premiere, hoping against hope that my cameraman wouldn't show up. But he did show up, so we set up and snagged Peter Tork for a quick red carpet interview.

"Thank you for speaking to me," I began.

"I haven't yet," said Tork, establishing an adversarial tone that would continue for the duration of the interview.

"Well, you just did," I pointed out.

"I was talking to that guy over there," he said, pointing to a random person in the crowd.

"Okay," I said, trying desperately to get this interview underway. "Can you tell me who you play in the movie?"

"No," said Tork, adding nothing more, and a string inside of me suddenly just broke.

"You... can't?" I managed.

"I don't know the name of my character," Tork admitted.

"All right," I said. "Can you talk about how you came to be involved in the project?"

"They asked me," said Tork.

I felt like Ashley Graham haplessly interviewing Hugh Grant at the 2023 Oscars, except that particular trainwreck wouldn't occur for another twenty years (trust me, Ashley: I know how you felt). I labored on with my questions, until finally, Tork stopped the interview cold and said, "You don't care about my answers at all, do you?"

"Yes, I do," I insisted. "I care deeply!"

"No you don't," said Tork. "You're just reading off a list of questions."

I stared at him helplessly, and that's when my cameraman shouted, "He's Movie Boy!" as if that was supposed to mean something to Tork.

"He's what?" said Tork.

"He's Movie Boy!"

"Oh," said Tork, seemingly chagrined, and instantly changed his attitude to serve up an earnest plug for his band, Shoe Suede Blues. (I had no idea the Movie Boy name carried such weight.)

That concluded the Peter Tork interview, which had left me an absolute wreck, but we still had to interview Peter Scolari. I flagged him down and my cameraman set up and I was so terrified, I could taste copper in my mouth.

I have no specific memory of what was said in the Scolari interview, except this: Scolari answered my questions openly and at length, and could not have been more gracious and kind. He was an instant balm.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹See GTS #95.

4/25/23

Hello, and welcome to the 175th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

File this one under conversations that would never fly in the workplace today (and probably never should have). When I worked at HBO Studio Productions in New York, I once had a job interview at the corporate office uptown. By coincidence, the guy who was going to be interviewing me used to date one of my coworkers, so I asked her if she could tell me anything about her ex that might give me a leg up in my interview. After careful consideration, she told me, "Well... he likes blowjobs."

"So, already we have something in common," I replied at once.

I did not bring this up in the interview, and I did not get the job. (Those two facts may or may not be related.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/27/23

Hello, and welcome to the 176th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Going home for Christmas break junior year in college, I had a third a tank of gas in my car and zero money in my pocket (as well as in my bank account). But I figured that would be okay, or rather, it would HAVE to be okay, because I didn't have any way to quickly acquire any gas money. (It's unclear to me now why I didn't ask to borrow money from somebody.) Anyway, I thought I probably had just enough gas to make it to my mom's (Joanne Tulonen's) house.

I was almost right.

I at least had the sense to be nervous about it. I was eyeing the gas gauge needle throughout the entire trip, my shoulders hunched, my teeth clenched, trying to will that needle to stay above the red E, but about ten miles from my mom's house, I ran out of gas. Fortunately for me, this happened just as I was coming to a rest stop, so I was able to pull off the highway and have immediate access to a phone and a restroom—which was far superior to running out of gas at some random point on the highway, especially since it was very dark out, and there was a raging blizzard going on. (Believe me, I realize that every detail of this story only makes me seem like more of a dumbass.)

The rest stop attendant on duty allowed me to use his phone (see above regarding zero money) to call my mom to report my predicament, but she was completely snowed in and unable to come to my rescue. The rest stop attendant, having heard my conversation (it was HIS phone, after all), offered me money from the emergency travelers' fund he had on hand (amounting to five dollars). Then he flagged down a guy coming out of the restroom to ask him if he was willing to give me a ride to the nearest gas station, which he was.

When we got to the gas station, I asked the guy working the register if I could borrow a gas can from the station, promising to bring it back in twenty minutes.

"No," he told me, "but you can BUY a gas can." (This story is full of heroes, but the gas station attendant isn't one of them.)

As it turns out, the cheapest gas can on hand cost five dollars, which would have tapped me out, leaving me with a gas can and exactly zero dollars' worth of gas. But the guy who had given me a ride was still around, so he floated me another four dollars.

So, now I had a gas can with four dollars' worth of gas in it, but no way to get back to my car. (The guy who had given me a ride and four bucks was a hero, but not a SUPERhero.) I considered walking, but it would be about two miles, on the highway, at night, in a blizzard—which didn't seem wise. So, I asked the gas station attendant if I could use the phone to call the police for assistance.

"No," he told me, for some reason feeling the need to elaborate: "We might get a call, you see? And if you're on the phone while someone's trying to call the station, then we'd miss the call, which is not acceptable. We can't be missing calls just 'cause you're having a tough time tonight."

"Okay," I said, having developed a keen enmity for this man during his little speech.

"There's a payphone around back," he offered. Finally.

So, I trudged back out into the raging blizzard, still clutching my little gas can filled with four dollars' worth of gas, found the payphone, and called 9-11.

"Officer Blodgett. What's your emergency?" said the dispatcher.

I explained where I was and what my situation was, and asked if I could get a ride in a police car back to my car.

"Where's your vehicle now?" asked Officer Blodgett.

"It's at a rest stop on I-89 between Exits 18 and 19," I told him.

"I see," he said. "And how are you defining 'rest stop'?"

At that point, all the tension I'd been holding in since I left school with no cash and not enough gas burst out of me like the Little Conemaugh River after the failure of the South Fork Dam. "I don't know how to answer that question!" I exclaimed. "It's a rest stop! You're on the highway, you pull off, you stop, you rest!"

"Okay, okay," said Officer Blodgett placatingly. "It's just, I don't show that there IS a rest stop between Exits 18 and 19 on I-89."

"Well, that's going to come as a hell of a surprise to the guy working there," I told him.

"Wait a minute," said Officer Blodgett. "Are you talking about 89 South?"

"Yeah, South," I agreed.

"That was the problem," said Officer Blodgett. "All right, I can get somebody out to you."

"That's great," I said, and went back into the gas station.

I hadn't spoken to my mom since I'd first called her, and I figured she was probably freaking out a little, but I didn't want to miss the police car when it came (the payphone being BEHIND the gas station), and I knew from experience that the gas station attendant would not let me use his phone, lest the gas station miss a call.

As I waited for the police car to arrive, the gas station attendant regaled me with a lengthy monologue about just how stupid I'd been, going out into a blizzard without enough gas (which, fair enough, but also: lesson learned, am I right?). "Gas is more important than food," he told me. "It's more important than anything, trust me." (Well, isn't that exactly what a gas station attendant WOULD say?)

"And you might as well settle in," he added. "The police have FAR more important things than you to worry about tonight."

After some additional hectoring that lasted about another hour, the gas station phone rang (for the first and only time since I'd arrived). The attendant picked it up, listened for a second, and extended it to me. "It's for you," he said, looking a little sore about it.

I took the phone and held it to my ear. "Hello?"

"Greg, this is Officer Blodgett. If you look outside, the police car should be arriving right about... NOW!"

I looked outside, and sure enough, a police cruiser was pulling up to the entrance. I waved goodbye to the friendly attendant and sprinted outside. The officer drove me north on I-89, then turned around and drove me south to the rest stop, where my car was still waiting. I put in my four dollars' worth of gas, and then went inside to call my mom from the rest stop attendant's phone.

Fifteen minutes later, I was home.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/2/23

Hello, and welcome to the 177th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My kindergarten was half-day (afternoons), so in the mornings, while my mom (Joanne Tulonen) was at work, I stayed at my classmate Heather's house. Heather's mother looked after us every morning until it was time to go to school, feeding us lunch before we left. Lunch was always a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, split between Heather and me.

One night, my mom asked me what I wanted for dinner. "Macaroni and cheese," I told her, so she whipped up (from scratch) a casserole dish of homemade macaroni and cheese, which I'm now certain was delicious, but when I saw it at age five, I burst into tears and informed my mom that this was not the way Heather's mother made macaroni and cheese.

"Fine," said my mom, deeply displeased. "Next time I'll just make the stuff that comes out of a box!"

"Yeah," I agreed, brightening a little, "that's the kind I like!"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/4/23

Hello, and welcome to the 178th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the mid-'90s, I wrote for a 'zine called Verbivore, which was produced, edited, and written entirely by some friends of mine. ('zines are what we had back then instead of podcasts.) For one issue, I wrote an article about my colleague, Albert Cardona (not his real name, but I did use his real name in the article). Albert kept an enormous collection of Simpsons paraphernalia in his office: posters, comic books, trading cards, bumper stickers, kites, lunch boxes, toys, games, a series of Franklin Mint commemorative plates, and on and on.

I used his real name because, why not? Our circulation probably hovered in the low dozens. But I painted him with an exaggerated, satirical brush, depicting him as a paranoid, obsessed freak. Here's the first paragraph:

Make no mistake: Albert Cardona understands that the characters on the popular Fox Network animated series "The Simpsons" are fictional. What is not immediately clear, and what remains uncertain, is just how much importance in his own mind Cardona places on the distinction between fiction and fact.

(Except, you know, I used Albert's real name.)

The article went on like that, and no, I did not tell Albert I had written it, but I did use a photo of him posing in his office with all of his Simpsons stuff. (The journalistic ethics in play here were shaky at best.)

Shortly after the issue came out, my editor informed me that all Verbivore content was going up on the world wide web. Obviously, that should have raised a red flag for me, but this was the very early days of the internet as we now know it. Websites accessed by the general public had only been around for about a year. My browser of choice was Netscape Navigator; my search engine was AltaVista. It was the wild, wild west, and it seemed possible, even likely, that an article published on the web could enjoy relative obscurity. Most people I knew didn't even have a modem yet. I did not ask for Albert's name to be changed for online publication, as I felt certain he would never see the article. (I know! I'm in the future also!¹)

A year or so later, Albert was walking through the office, and as he passed my desk, he darkly murmured, "I need to talk to you."

Yes, he'd seen the article. Obviously. The first thing anybody ever searched for back then when they first encountered the internet was their own name.

Fortunately, he thought it was hilarious.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Joke stolen from the great Mike Birbiglia.

5/9/23

Hello, and welcome to the 179th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

As a follow-up to last Tuesday's secret about five-year-old me informing my mom (Joanne Tulonen) that she'd made the wrong kind of macaroni and cheese, I'll share a similar incident from my own parenthood: When our kids were little, I always made their sandwiches the same way, folding two turkey slices in half side-by-side, so a single folded-over slice occupied each half of the sandwich. But when our friend Jennifer Dubois made the kids sandwiches one day, she didn't do it that way. She just stacked two turkey slices on top of each other and cut the whole thing in half. My five-year-old eyed the sandwich dubiously, informing her, "That's not the way Daddy makes sandwiches."

When Jen told me about this later, she was a little annoyed, but I'll have to admit that it warmed my heart. Still, I once again felt a twinge of regret, recalling the time I'd done essentially the same thing to my mom.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/11/23

Hello, and welcome to the 180th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This is really my dad's secret, but he's not around anymore, so I'm going to share it. (I do have a cameo.)

One day, when my dad was sorting his mail, he stopped to puzzle over a card from Susan in Raleigh, North Carolina, who thanked him for his interest and his kindness. "You really made my day," the card's inscription concluded.

"Who the hell is this?" my dad wanted to know.

"Don't you know?" I asked.

"I have no idea," he said.

"Well, that's odd."

Later in the day, my dad recalled that Susan in Raleigh, North Carolina had been a survey-taker who had called him the previous month. Rather than answer her questions, my dad had asked questions of his own. What's your name? Where are you calling from? How did you get this job? How long have you been doing it? Do you like it? Are you in an office or do you work from home? Is there a job you'd rather be doing right now? And so on, evolving into a 45-minute conversation about Susan in Raleigh, North Carolina's life.

Even though I wasn't there for the call, I can picture it perfectly. I can totally see my dad taking over, forcing Susan in Raleigh, North Carolina to go completely off-script, answering questions from a stranger rather than asking them. My dad was fascinated by other people, wanted to know all about them, and he was charming enough to get people to really open up, including Susan in Raleigh, North Carolina.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/16/23

Hello, and welcome to the 181st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was thirteen, I flew to Japan to visit my dad, who was working in the city of Kobe for the year. I spent a month there, attending (an English-language) Japanese school, eating Japanese food, learning about Japanese culture, and mastering (a very small portion of) the Japanese language.

One night, my dad sent me out by myself to secure dinner for us. I walked to a nearby takeout place and ordered the tempura. (Believe it or not, the Japanese word for tempura is "tempura.")

When the food was ready, I asked, "Ikuradesu ka?" which is Japanese for "How much is it?"

I paid in yen, collected my change, and said, "Dōmo arigatō," which is Japanese for "Thank you very much," as any Styx fan can tell you—although that particular song would not be released for another two months. (Boy, was I surprised when I first heard it!)

Then the restaurant worker said to me, in flawless English, "Thank you very much, young man. Have a pleasant evening."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/18/23

Hello, and welcome to the 182nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Longtime GTS readers may have concluded that the title of this series is something of a misnomer. Various individuals on my feed have heard (or been participants in) a lot of these stories, so they're not exactly secrets, are they? More like anecdotes. Chalk it up to false advertising, I guess, or maybe poor planning.¹

However, today's installment is a genuine secret, one I'd never told another living soul until I confessed it to my wife and children a few days ago. I especially never told my mom, Joanne Tulonen, whom this secret affects most directly.

Forty-some years ago, there was an album my mom and I listened to a lot called "A Delicate Balance," by Chicago singer-songwriter Tom Dundee, whom my mom had seen perform at The Folkway in Peterborough, New Hampshire. One night, I was carrying a slice of my mom's delicious homemade peach pie into the living room. Pie in my right hand, I attempted with my left hand to flip "A Delicate Balance" over to the B side so we could listen to it. That's when the pie slipped off my plate, landing on the record with a dismaying splat.

Thinking back upon this incident, it occurs to me now that what I'd been attempting with the record-flipping maneuver (while holding a slice of pie) had been its own kind of "delicate balance," one that had fallen out of balance with spectacular finality. But that particular linguistic synchronicity did not occur to me in the moment, distracted as I was by my blinding panic.

My mom still in the kitchen, I frantically scooped up the pie with my fingers and wiped off the record as best I could with a napkin, but there was still a giant, extremely noticeable peach pie smear across the surface of the vinyl, which (I confirmed later when my mom was out of the house) would produce an audible distortion every time the record needle encountered it.

So, rather than play side B of "A Delicate Balance" that night, I just sat down and joylessly ate my pie in silence. Then, when my mom was out of the room again, I put the record back in its sleeve, the sleeve back in its cover, and the whole album back in my mom's record collection.

I dreaded the moment my mom would pull out "A Delicate Balance" again. But, astonishingly, she never did. Despite the fact that the album had been in heavy rotation in our house, she apparently never had the urge to listen to Tom Dundee ever again. My crime remained concealed.

Still, I carried this burden with me. The album fell out of print, but in the early 2000s, I tracked down an email address for Tom Dundee himself, and I wrote to him to ask if there was a digital copy of "A Delicate Balance" out there in the world somewhere. He wrote back to tell me that there wasn't, and that he didn't even have the masters anymore, but he thanked me for my interest.

So, I bought a used copy of the record on eBay, and then I ripped the whole thing to digital (the mp3s reproducing the old-fashioned crackle of old vinyl), but I still couldn't bring myself to tell my mom about the terrible incident that had occurred so many years earlier.

At last, I'm coming clean. Mom, I'm sorry about the peach pie stain on your copy of "A Delicate Balance," and if you'd like the replacement album I got off eBay (or the individual mp3s I ripped), just let me know.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹As I revealed way back in GTS #50, when I wrote the very first "Greg Tulonen Secrets" post, it didn't even occur to me that there might be a second one.

5/23/23

Hello, and welcome to the 183rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I'm not very good at ping-pong. In fact, I'm downright bad. But there's a wide disparity between my backhand (which is actually kind of great) and my forehand (which is pathetic bordering on nonexistent). I once played against Chad Anderson, who is a sterling player, his tennis-playing skills naturally transferring to the ping-pong table. And yet, I was doing surprisingly well against him, scoring again and again until I got to match point, after which I never scored again. After the game, Chad revealed that he'd been in control the entire time, deliberately playing to my strength (my backhand, as I've mentioned), which he could not beat, and then switching to my weakness (my forehand), whereupon he beat me pretty easily.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/25/23

Hello, and welcome to the 184th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

At summer camp, docks and buoys divided the swimming section of the lake into three zones: Red Pool, for non-swimmers, where the water didn't go more than chest-high (on a six-year-old); Yellow Pool, slightly deeper, for moderate swimmers, to which you could obtain access by demonstrating an ability to swim two laps between the docks; and Green Pool (the deepest water yet), for strong swimmers, which you could access by swimming ten laps, treading water for two minutes, and retrieving a stone from the bottom of the lake. Green Pool had a raft, and being allowed to swim out to the raft was the most desirable thing a six-year-old could imagine (this particular six-year-old, anyway).

I told my uncle David, who worked on the waterfront staff, that I wanted to try out for Green Pool. He was skeptical, but I was determined, so I got in the water and I woefully swam those ten laps (fully exhausting myself in the process). Then, while another waterfront staffer watched me tread water for two minutes and retrieve a stone from the bottom of the lake, David (unbeknownst to me) walked up to talk to my mom, who was the camp photographer (but who had been the waterfront director the previous summer).

"Joanne," he said, through the darkroom door to my mom, who was printing pictures (and thus unable to open the door), "what would you do if a kid technically did everything he had to do to get into Green Pool, but he looked like he was drowning the entire time?"

"I wouldn't let him in," said my mom, demonstrating unsentimental pragmatism. "Green Pool is for strong swimmers only."

"Well, your son just did that," David revealed.

"Oh," said my mom, demonstrating motherly protectiveness. "Well, if you told him he could get into Green Pool, you need to let him into Green Pool."

So, I got into Green Pool. Every free swim, I swam out to the raft, and then lay on the raft, exhausted, until free swim was over.

It was awesome.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/30/23

Hello, and welcome to the 185th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One day in 2008, I got a voicemail message that was about one minute of silence—except it wasn't dead silence; it seemed to be a live connection, with even a bit of background noise. I played it again, and this time, very faintly, I heard someone in the background, whispering, as if they were calling from inside a closet with an intruder in the house, except the content of the message wasn't urgent at all: "Hi, Greg and Kate," the voice whispered. "I just wanted to let you know that we got the package."

There was a long pause, and then the person started over, still whispering. "Hi, Greg and Kate... I just wanted to let you know... that we got the package."

I hit "repeat" and listened again, as intently as I could. This time, I became aware of a noise in the foreground, the sound of someone breathing, and I could tell it was my dad on the phone, even though he hadn't uttered a word. I recognized his breath, recognized the tiny, subtle sub-vocal sounds he was making as classic indicators of his frustration and anger, and finally, I understood what was going on.

You see, the previous year, my dad had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, which wasn't exactly a surprise, after years of troubling memory issues, but the definitive diagnosis had been a blow. As many of you know from my stories about him, my dad had always been a figure of strength—the guy who could force litterers to go back and pick up their trash, could make whole movie theater audiences stop talking, could convince a closed gas station to re-open for one more fill-up. It was hard to see him vulnerable, not in control.

One of the most prominent symptoms to emerge after the diagnosis was aphasia, which affects a person's ability to express and understand language. (He once asked me for a "wattle wat" while simultaneously making a vague gesture with his hands, and I understood at once that he was asking for a paper towel.)

Anway, getting back to that voicemail: He had been calling us to thank us for a gift we had sent, but when he'd gotten our voicemail, he'd frozen, forgetting what he was going to say. That voice whispering in the background had been my stepmother, Pat, who had been trying to coach him through it, but he hadn't been able to focus on what she was saying. At one point, I could hear him try to hand her the phone, and heard her tell him: "No, you can do it!" at which point he grunted in frustration and hung up.

I listened to the message one more time, even though it was excruciating, just to cement my understanding of what was going on, but it wasn't really necessary.

I called him the next day, but he was having a boy's night out with Pat's ex-husband. Pat told me that his condition was worse at night when he was tired, and was worse on the phone when he couldn't see the person, and it was even worse when he had to leave a message and didn't have a person to respond to. She told me he'd been deeply embarrassed by the message, and feared that when I heard it, I'd know something was wrong—which I totally already knew.

Sorry, this wasn't really as funny as some other Greg Tulonen Secrets, but I'm thinking a lot about my dad today, the eighth anniversary of his death. I'll miss him forever. I'll be telling stories about him forever.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/1/23

Hello, and welcome to the 186th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I've tried not to make the GTS series a collection of grievances or a compendium of grudges, mostly because, well, how boring would that be? Sure, I've chronicled the occasional injustice, but for the most part, I've tried to share stories that were interesting and/or entertaining.

Still, there's a danger that today's GTS will come across as the petty settling of an old score. (My older child still talks about that time his third grade teacher was unfair to him, and believe me when I tell you that I hope to someday never hear that story again.) I don't want this GTS installment to come across like that, but despite my best efforts, it might.

Fair warning.

A couple weeks after I started pursuing my Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) at UMass Amherst, my dear friend Jeff Gilbert was killed by a hit-and-run driver in New York City. Shortly thereafter, I guess to help process my grief, I wrote a thinly fictionalized account of his funeral in Abilene, Texas, titling the story "Ash Paradise," which was taken from a sort-of poem Jeff had once drunkenly scrawled on the back of a takeout menu, excerpted below:

Arrogant Questions

Untie the knot. Where does it go?
Rope heaven?
Cut off John the Baptist's head. Where does the revelation go?
Onto the plate?
Stamp out the flames. Where does the fire go?
Ash paradise?

My first draft of "Ash Paradise" was rough and raw and certainly in need of revision, but it helped me emotionally, I think, to have written it.

Flash forward to a writing workshop I signed up for, taught by a professor who'd been mentored by the renowned editor Gordon Lish. Lish, who had discovered (and heavily edited/rewritten) Raymond Carver, was famous for his grueling and "hellish" writing workshops at Columbia University, workshops in which he would interrupt, berate, and insult his students.¹

On the first day of my workshop, the professor passed around a sign-up sheet for students to choose the dates they'd be submitting stories for review. I was sitting directly to her right, but she passed it left, and when it got to me, I saw that no one had signed up for the next class. There were other, later slots open, but I figured somebody had to go first, so I wrote my name down in the first slot and submitted my draft of "Ash Paradise."

The next class, my professor, inviting no comment from students, spent the first two hours going over my story line by line, calling it out for its ineptitude and "fraudulence" (a word she kept coming back to). Now, there's evidence that such a teaching approach can be effective, and it's supported by popular culture (see the films The Paper Chase and Whiplash, among many others, all featuring stern, hectoring educators and coaches), but I can tell you that it soured me on writing anything for about a year, and I still consider it the worst educational experience of my life.²

Also, if I may: This was pretty clearly an autobiographical story about a terrible (and recent) event, which, I must emphasize, should not make it immune from criticism, but maybe... tread lightly? My number-one goal when I was teaching writing was always "first do no harm." This was clearly not my professor's number-one goal. (In her written comments on my story, she advised me to throw it away and make no attempt to revise.)

After her two-hour demolition, she opened the floor for class discussion, but I think everyone was so shell-shocked, only the most tepid of exchanges followed. After class, my classmates took me out for a drink.

The next day, the professor approached me at a school function and, with an airy giggle, lightly apologized to me for the previous night's class. I assured her that wasn't necessary, but really, the damage had already calcified.

A few years later, shortly before graduation, I won (for a different story) the Harvey Swados Prize in fiction writing, an award open to graduating UMass MFAers. It had been judged that year, coincidentally enough, by Gordon Lish himself.

This was a prestigious award. Traditionally, the Harvey Swados winner would deliver a 30-minute reading at the culmination of the year-end awards ceremony, but the day before the ceremony, that same professor called me to ask if I would be okay with giving only a five-minute reading, so the ceremony could also showcase the work of a select group of other students of her choosing. I said yes. Of course I said yes. What else could I say? But seriously: WTF?

I should acknowledge, I guess, that this professor was extremely helpful to many other students I love and admire (including some folks who may be reading this now), but for me, not so much. I believed then, as I do now, that she neither liked nor respected me (or my writing).

Here's a petty postscript: That professor had—coincidentally—attended (about a decade before me) the same undergraduate school I had, Middlebury College. So when, shortly after receiving my MFA, I won the annual Middlebury College alumni fiction writing contest (for yet another story), it pleased me to think about her receiving in her mailbox the Middlebury alumni magazine containing my prize-winning story.³

Here's another postscript, not as petty, but certainly satisfying: When a much later draft of "Ash Paradise" was accepted for publication, this is the voicemail I received: "Hi, Greg! This is Ashley from [garbled, hissing, static]. We've been reading your story, 'Ash Paradise,' and we absolutely love it! We want to include it in our next issue, so please call me back ASAP at 608-[garbled, hissing static] to let us know if it's still available. Thanks!"

At that time, I had "Ash Paradise" out to about seven different journals (policies against simultaneous submissions be damned), so it took a bit of frantic detective work to figure out which one had accepted it. "608" is the area code of Madison, Wisconsin, and sure enough, it turned out to be The Madison Review, which published "Ash Paradise" in its Winter 2004 issue.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." Tune in on Saturday for a very special, adults-only episode (ooh la la!), and then we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming on Tuesday.

¹He'd been so taken with my professor, however, that he'd allowed her to read her entire 80-page novella in front of the class, all in one sitting.

²UPDATE: As you may know, this series was originally published on my Facebook page. When I moved it to my website, all the smart, funny, lovely comments people had written were left behind. But I wanted to share this one, because sometimes I feel like I must be misremembering this incident, or exaggerating its awfulness in my mind. The following comment was written by "Beth F," who was in the room when it happened:

I believe, I hope anyway, that we took you out for drinks plural, and I may be wishfully remembering that there were shots involved. If not, I owe you. There were gravy fries, I'm pretty sure.

Here's my salient memory of that "workshop": that she mocked the phrase "eye contact." She very obnoxiously scoffed, "Like what, their eyes were touching???" I can still see the physical gestures she made and the scorn on her face.

Shell-shocked for sure. It was juvenile, cringey, and gross. And nothing she could ever do, say, or write would redeem her.

It's one of the small handful of scenes from the MFA era that I can recall with precision. It definitely happened. It was definitely fucked up...It was exactly that bad.

So, there you go. An objective witness to the same event. It truly was terrible.

³Of course, as revealed in GTS #94, it's entirely possible she never noticed it; plenty of people didn't, including my own mom.

6/3/23

Hello, and welcome to the 187th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

People find reassurance in the formal terms and rituals designed to help usher us through life's uncomfortable moments, as in the ceremonial language and structure of a funeral, for example; or, to cite an instance from the other end of the life cycle, the intrauterine insemination process, or IUI.

(If anyone wants to bail out now, godspeed to you; things are going to get a little grisly.)

The IUI process involves the injection of sperm directly into the uterus with a catheter, bypassing the need for the spermatozoa to make it all the way through the cervix, which is coated with a mucus layer that can impede a little spermatozoon's progress when it's been introduced the old-fashioned way.

(It's not too late. You can go read something else. I won't judge.)

When you go through the IUI process, as Kate and I did many years ago, four times over four months, things like inhibitions and embarrassment tend to fall by the wayside, with strangers commenting on the viscosity of Kate's cervical fluid and the "lushness" of her cervix; not to mention the process by which the sperm is procured in the first place, which is very much the old-fashioned way.

(Seriously, my less hardy readers should stop now. Final warning.)

"Will you be collecting here?" the nurse asked me when we arrived at the hospital that fourth time, and that's what I was referring to above when I mentioned those formal terms and rituals designed to ease us through life's awkward moments, like when you arrive at a designated location for the express purpose of jerking off, and the nurse says, "Will you be collecting here?"—a supposedly soothing euphemism.

"Yes," I told her. "I'm here to, uh, collect."

She gave me a plastic cup and ushered me to the "Collection Room," a small, dimly lit space with a sink (thank God), a television, a VCR, and a plush chair draped with a fresh sheet, which a sign on the wall informed me was to be deposited into the "soiled linen bin" upon completion of one's task. On a counter lay some old Playboys, well-thumbed (and it was probably best not to think about HOW well thumbed, or what else those thumbs may have been touching at the time).

There were also some videotapes. One was in the machine already, and I immediately ejected it, not wanting to start (or even know) where some other guy had "finished." The available videos included "Super Sex Hour 55" (hours 1 through 54 having apparently been lost to the ages), "The Backdoor Club" (which almost sounds like it could be the title of a kids' show on Nickelodeon, until you think about it), and—most alarmingly—"Fresh Meat #3." I tried one video for a few seconds, but it was just a bunch of extreme close-ups of penetration, which was sort of like watching footage of a pneumatic hammer. I turned it off.

Playboy didn't do much for me either. First of all, I found it depressing how much younger than me all the models were. Secondly, the nude photos were contextless and airbrushed to the point of abstraction, the models' skin so shiny and gleaming, it was hard to tell the women apart from the snazzy gadgets profiled a few pages away.

So, I recalled the guidance I'd been given by grown-ups so many times when I was a child: "Use your imagination!" (Luckily, after years of practice, my imagination was well prepared.)

And right away, I encountered a problem. How do I put this delicately? (Or is it way too late for delicacy?) You see, the stuff you're supposed to be collecting, when produced correctly, tends to travel in a somewhat upward trajectory, but I (like most people in the world, I suspect) find it easier to fill a container with liquid that's traveling in a somewhat downward trajectory. So what to do? I'm not sure how others before me dealt with this particular dilemma, but my solution was to sit upside-down in the chair during the "collection process" (an acrobatic feat Kate marveled at in my recounting of it).

My emission accomplished, the "specimen" was delivered to the lab, where it underwent an extensive washing process, in which the more sluggish spermatozoa got weeded out. Mine turned out to be numerous and peppy that day, I was told later by the nurse practitioner who performed the IUI—50 million strong, 80% of them straight swimmers, which are impressive numbers, or so I gathered.

Indeed, one of them hit the bullseye, resulting in our older child, born twenty years ago today. So: Happy birthday, son!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/6/23

Hello, and welcome to the 188th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I turned 21, I lived in Middlebury, Vermont. At that time, the Vermont driver's license did not include a photo unless you went to the state capital (Montpelier) and got your license there. At any other town's DMV, you'd receive a photo-less license, which was fine, I suppose, unless you wanted to buy alcohol. Vermont liquor store proprietors (at least the ones I encountered) did not accept a photo-less Vermont driver's license as proof of age, even if it was accompanied by a student ID, which DID have a photo (along with a name, date of birth, and signature, all matching the driver's license).

Natalya Baldyga and I got so fed up with this ridiculous state of affairs that we made the hour-and-a-half trek to Montpelier to get our super-fancy Vermont driver's license upgrades, with photos and everything. (Aside: This can't possibly still be true, can it? Vermont drivers don't still have to go all the way to Montpelier to get a photo ID, do they?)

On our way back from Montpelier, Natalya and I kept stopping to buy beer, hoping somebody would card us, but nobody did. We ended up back in Middlebury with a trunkful of beer we didn't even really want, and with valid photo IDs that nobody had asked to see.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/8/23

Hello, and welcome to the 189th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I live two miles from where I was born, but it's not because of family or a childhood home or anything like that.

It's literally just a coincidence.

When I was three years old, my family moved to Massachusetts, leaving behind no close relatives in Maine. After that, I lived in Montana and Vermont and New Jersey and New York and back to Massachusetts, but still had little connection to Maine, aside from having been born there. But back in Massachusetts, I married Kate Dionne, who was also from Maine, with a strong desire to go back. So, when she accepted a job at Central Maine Community College, I—like a swallow returning Capistrano or a salmon coming home to spawn—found myself moving back to my birthplace.

By the way, that wedding to Kate I just mentioned occurred twenty-two years ago tomorrow. Happy anniversary, love!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/13/23

Hello, and welcome to the 190th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Sophomore year in college, Jeff McMahan, Jim Nida, and I participated in a triathlon, with me taking the first leg (swimming), Jeff taking the second leg (biking), and Jim taking the third leg (running). I can't remember the exact distances involved, but they were modest—we're not talking about an Ironman here. My piece was maybe a mile, or sixteen laps in a fifty-meter pool. I do remember that I didn't train for it. At all. I kept telling myself I ought to head over to the pool at least once, and maybe pace out what sixteen laps felt like, but I kept not doing it, ultimately rationalizing my procrastination by deciding I was just a naturally strong swimmer.¹

Thinking back on it now, I'm reminded of that "Saturday Night Live" sketch in which Martin Short played one half of a men's Olympic synchronized swimming duo. ("I'm not that... strong a swimmer.")²

On race day, I started out very strong and fast, pulling well ahead of my competitors. Then, as I completed my first lap, an official counter called off, "One!" so I'd be able to keep track of my progress. That "One!" reverberated around in my head, reminding me of the fifteen laps I had left, and my pace suddenly slowed to just slightly above a standstill. A casual acquaintance who was in attendance later assured me that this was the funniest thing he'd ever seen.

When I finally finished my sixteen laps, I stumbled outside, dripping wet and disoriented, and I only very recently discovered that this exact moment was captured on film, as you can see here. That's me on the left, in the stylish trunks, and Jeff on the right, waving for me to tag him so he can get going on the bike leg. I touched his hand, then ran behind the building to throw up. (I guess I should have trained.) No matter. Jeff had been so nervous, he'd thrown up before the event, and Jim was so hungover, he threw up while he was running. So, between the three of us, we threw up before, after, and during our respective efforts. I dubbed us the B.A.D. Boot Club.

I don't remember how we did in the race overall, but I suspect that it was... not respectably.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹See GTS #184, in which I got into my summer camp's "Green Pool" at age six.

²It's really worth watching the whole thing:

6/15/23

Hello, and welcome to the 191st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One summer, four friends and I rented a cabin for a week in Ocean Park, Maine. We were coming from New York City, with, I suppose, all the "from away" city-folk baggage that goes along with that. Here's one example:

Wanting the full Maine experience, we stopped at a roadside stand to buy some steamers. None of us knew how steamers should be prepared, so I (for some reason) was appointed spokesperson to ask the guy working the stand (an old-time Mainer if there ever was one) how to do it.

"So, uh," I began, as he bagged up our steamers, "how would you go about... uh... cooking these?"

The guy stared at me with gaping incredulity, as if he had just discovered what a spectacular jackass I was, which I suppose he had.

His voice riddled with scorn, he told me, quite loudly, "Ya steam 'em!"

As it turns out, with steamed clams—as with the grilled cheese sandwich—the recipe is in the name.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/20/23

Hello, and welcome to the 192nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Here's a "funny" Alzheimer's story about my dad, after GTS #185's more somber outing. When he was first diagnosed, my dad's driver's license was automatically suspended. This infuriated him. He vowed to fight the suspension, which turned out to be a pretty easy thing to do: all you have to do is pass a basic driver's test, and you get your license back. He was still perfectly capable of operating a car, so he made an appointment, and my stepmother drove him down to the DMV.

When it was his turn, he went out into the parking lot with his evaluator, but he couldn't remember which car was his. They wandered around the parking lot for a few minutes before giving up, and therefore he failed his driver's test without even getting into the car. So, he made another appointment, came back, and failed again for the exact same reason.

Okay, it's not THAT funny. But still, it's kind of funny, especially if you knew my dad.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/22/23

Hello, and welcome to the 193rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I'm a big fan of the musician Jonathan Richman, whose song "Roadrunner" may just be the purest rock & roll song ever recorded. In 1994, Kate Culkin, Chad Anderson, and I went to a taping of "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" for the express purpose of seeing Richman as the musical guest. Here's a clip of that episode, and if you listen very closely, you can hear me excitedly shout "Jonathan!" at around the seven-second mark:

After the show, Richman was hanging around onstage, so we went up to talk to him. He was friendly and charming, and we invited him to a party Kate was throwing a couple of nights later. Chad promised there would be plenty of dancing, and Richman broke into a little impromptu dance in front of us, smiling hugely. He took down Kate's address and told us he'd try to come.

Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, he did not come to Kate's party, but a few years later, he did release a song entitled "The Night Is Still Young," about a guy driving around at 3 a.m., trying to find a party he's been invited to (by strangers), but not having any luck.

And even though it's completely ridiculous, I choose to believe that this is a true story about Jonathan Richman trying (and failing) to make it to Kate's party.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/27/23

Hello, and welcome to the 194th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Remember how I asserted back in GTS #186 that I didn't want this series to become a collection of past grievances? Well, never mind all that, because have I got a tale to tell you! Prepare to be outraged.

Every Monday in second grade, we had music class, and at the end of class, we'd sing the following song:

The wise old owl sat in an oak
The more he heard, the less he spoke
The more he heard, the less he spoke

While we sang, the music teacher would look very carefully at all our faces, deciding who among us had the "brightest eyes." Whichever kid had the brightest eyes would receive an illustration of an owl on heavy card stock, laminated and affixed to a length of string, to wear around their neck for the whole week, at which point they'd have to return it to the music teacher, so she could give it out again on Monday.

I very much wanted to win this prize. As far as I was concerned, that illustrated, laminated owl was like an Olympic gold medal. Every Monday when we sang, I'd open my eyes big and wide, hoping that would make them "brighter."

One week, this technique apparently paid off. I had the brightest eyes! I was so excited. But then I found out that the kid who had won the previous week had forgotten to turn the owl in, and furthermore, had left it at home over the weekend.

"Don't worry," another classmate told me. "I'll make you an owl." He drew an owl on a piece of paper, cut it out, attached it to a piece of yarn, and gave it to me. So, that's what I wore.

It was NOT the same. My owl was on paper instead of card stock, it was unlaminated instead of laminated, and it had been drawn by a seven-year-old instead of a professional artist. In other words, it sucked. It was like winning the gold medal at the Olympics and being handed a chocolate coin in gold foil, which for whatever reason had already been opened and half-eaten.

Day after day, the kid who had won the previous week kept forgetting to bring back the real owl, and day after day, I had to wear around my neck this stinky turd of an owl drawn by an untalented seven-year-old.

Finally, on Friday, the real owl was returned, but it was too late. It went straight to the music teacher for distribution the following Monday to another bright-eyed student. I felt like I should get it, since I'd been saddled with that shabby fugazi all week, but it was not to be.

I tried to win again. Week after week, I tried to win again, so I could get a chance to wear the genuine article, but week after week, I lost. Of course I lost. I now understand that every kid won once and only once, but back then, week after week, I actually thought I might have a shot. So, out of everybody who eventually won (which was everybody), I was the only one who never got to wear the laminated owl.

Folks, you know me. You know I'm not one for hyperbole. But I think we can all agree that this is the greatest injustice ever perpetrated.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/29/23

Hello, and welcome to the 195th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

At my aunt Patty and Ed Kelly's wedding reception (thirty-three years ago tomorrow), the bride and groom soon grew weary of kissing on demand every time the crowd clinked their glasses with their silverware. So, they implemented a rule that they would only kiss if a table sang (in unison) any song with the word "love" in the lyrics. I quickly led my table in a rousing rendition of the classic commercial jingle, "I Wish I Were an Oscar Mayer Wiener." In case you've forgotten (or are unfamiliar), the lyrics are as follows:

Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener
That is what I'd truly like to be
'Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener
Everyone would be in 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲 with me

Happy anniversary, Patty and Ed!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/4/23

Hello, and welcome to the 196th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

From 2007 to 2011, I worked as the web producer for Fox23 in Portland, Maine. It was a good job, in many ways, mostly because of some truly exceptional people working there. Then one day my boss called me into his office to tell me he was eliminating my position. It was a long conversation, but the only information I actually needed was that he was eliminating my position. So, I waited him out while he said everything he wanted to say, which took about twenty agonizing minutes, and when he was finally done, I told him that I had some personal items in my office that I would need to pack up.

That was an understatement. Over the previous four years, I had amassed a truly astonishing amount of stuff in my office: books and lamps and framed prints and posters and computer equipment and event flyers and on and on. So, while our office manager sat right outside my office to ensure I didn't steal any company property, I began the long, humiliating process of disassembling my office. It took a while, long enough for the rest of the company to slowly get wind of what had happened, and to come to my office one by one to offer their condolences and say their goodbyes. I was grateful enough for their support, but so embarrassed and freaked out, I just wanted to get out of there as fast as humanly possible.

As I drove home with my car now jammed with all my office stuff, I reflected on Robert De Niro's words in the movie "Heat":

Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat.

That's some damned good advice, I thought, and (spoiler!) ignoring it cost De Niro's character his life.

For my next job, I vowed to keep only enough personal items at work that would fit in a small backpack, which I would also keep on hand, just in case. I'm still at that job, thankfully, but when COVID hit and we switched to work-from-home, I was able to pack up my things in thirty seconds flat and carry it all away on my shoulder.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/6/23

Hello, and welcome to the 197th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When he was three weeks old, our older child started throwing up. Just a little at first, then a lot. He'd open his mouth, and milk would pour out of him like a faucet. We took him to the pediatrician (twice, two different doctors, multiple nurses), and everyone we talked to treated us like nervous new parents who didn't understand that babies spit up.

With a little help from Dr. Sears' "The Baby Book," as well as WebMD, we armchair-diagnosed him as having pyloric stenosis, which is the narrowing of the opening from the stomach to the first part of the small intestine, preventing anything from processing through the baby's digestive system. But doctors aren't much interested in parents' amateur diagnoses of their new babies. Everyone told us to go home.

I'm going to pause here for a lengthy aside about WebMD. If you've spent any time on that particular website, you'll know that anyone with a little imagination (or a lot of hypochondria) could easily self-diagnose themselves with everything from asthma to the Zika virus. But I'm here to tell you that this particular phenomenon pre-dates WebMD by about a century. I love the following passage from Jerome K. Jerome's 1889 novel, Three Men in a Boat:

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.

>All of which is to say, doctors have been dealing with self-diagnosing patients (and parents) for a long, long time.

Anyway, we took our baby to the pediatrician again (asking to see yet another doctor), and Kate fed him while we waited, loading him up until he was good and plump, and when the doctor walked in, the kid went full-Exorcist all over the exam room.

"That isn't just normal baby spit-up," said the doctor, which we already knew. He tentatively agreed with our pyloric stenosis diagnosis, but wanted a scan to confirm, so he sent us to the hospital, where our baby would get an X-ray, and then (assuming the X-ray confirmed the diagnosis) surgery to correct the issue.

But before we could get the pyloric stenosis addressed, we had to navigate the bureaucracy of the hospital system. Even though our doctor had called ahead and ordered the X-ray, we found ourselves having to explain over and over again to each person we encountered what the baby's symptoms were and what we'd already tried. "Have you tried feeding him?" "If we feed him, he'll throw it all up again." "How do you know?" "Because he has pyloric stenosis. Nothing can get through." "And what is your understanding of pyloric stenosis?" "A blockage between the stomach and the bowel." "How do you know he has pyloric stenosis?" "He has all the symptoms, and our doctor thinks he has it, but we need you to do an X-ray to confirm." "What made you decide he needed an X-ray?" "Our doctor ordered it." "If you don't feed him, he'll get dehydrated." "He'll get dehydrated anyway. Nothing can get into his system." "How do you know?" "He's been diagnosed with pyloric stenosis." "Have you tried feeding him?"

It was like a sinister game of Chutes & Ladders in which all the ladders had been removed. But to get him treatment, we had to move through the board, one space at a time, answering the same questions over and over again, trying to avoid any chutes that might whisk us right out of the place.

Finally, finally, finally, the hospital agreed to perform the X-ray our doctor had ordered hours earlier. I waited in the corridor, holding our boy, as we listened to the child ahead of us being murdered in the X-ray room. That's what it sounded like anyway. It sounded like they were taking their time, doing it right, starting with her feet and working their way up, in order to prolong her screams for as long as possible. Our baby just looked up at me placidly, unaware that he was next. His feet looked like little dinner rolls. They had never touched the ground.

I'd been a father for exactly 26 days, and I was scared to death.

The X-ray confirmed what we'd known all along: He had pyloric stenosis, which called for immediate surgery. The kid was whisked away, and Kate and I waited. We waited long past the time we were told we'd have to wait, more than an hour past that time, going half out of our minds with worry, until a nurse came out and told us that the surgery had gone fine, that everything was fine, and soon we'd be able to take our boy home.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/11/23

Hello, and welcome to the 198th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I remember once when I was four or five years old, waiting for my mother (Joanne Tulonen) to finish making dinner, a process that was taking entirely too long, as far as I was concerned. From the kitchen doorway, I watched her busily prepare the meal, and the only way to convey my impatience, I decided, was to pretend I was literally starving to death. So, that's what I did. I clutched my stomach in mock-agony, and collapsed in the doorway of the kitchen, my head lolling back and my tongue sticking out dramatically.

My mother did not not notice this display, or if she did notice, she declined to react to it.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/13/23

Hello, and welcome to the 199th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I lived in the East Village in New York, the actor Ethan Hawke evidently lived nearby, because I'd often see him hanging out in the local bars, drinking with his back to the bar (so everyone in the place could see him, I presumed) or bumming cigarettes off of other people, including my friend John Thomas. (This is back when you could smoke in bars.) And look, I know bumming cigarettes is a part of smoking culture, but come on, man, you're a movie star; you don't have to be bumming cigarettes off people.

Around the time I lived there, "Reality Bites" came out, and that movie ends with Hawke returning to Winona Ryder after some douchey move on his part had briefly split them up. When she sees him, standing in front of her in a suit, he says: "I have a planet of regret on my shoulders," which I've always thought was a spectacularly corny line. One night, I was in a bar with Chad Anderson, and we saw that Hawke was standing right next to Chad, his attention elsewhere. I placed a hand on Chad's shoulder and said to him, loud enough for Hawke to hear, "Chad, I have a planet of regret on my shoulders," and Chad was so mortified, he immediately fled the bar.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/18/23

Hello, and welcome to the 200th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Once, while exiting short-term parking at Logan airport and waiting to pay the attendant, the guy in the car in front of us was having a bit of a fit, screaming and carrying on and pounding his dashboard with his fist.

"What's that guy's problem?" Kate wanted to know.

"To be fair," I said, "he's going through a lot right now."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/20/23

Hello, and welcome to the 201st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was around 21, I had a blowout on the highway. I managed to steer the car up into a rest stop.¹

When I got out of the car, I was shocked to discover that the tire was completely gone, with only the rim remaining. I knew how to change a tire, but it was bitterly cold that day, and the spare tire in the trunk was frozen fast to the metal beneath it. Tugging at it with all my might only succeeded only in lifting the entire frame of the car up, very slightly.

The closest adult (I know, I was 21, and technically an adult myself, but still) was my stepmother Pat, so I called her, collect, since I had absolutely no change on me. As it happens, she was in the shower when I called, and the phone was answered by my stepbrother Nicholas, who was only six or seven years old.

The call was entirely automated, with no human operator involved, and it went a little something like this:

Robot Operator: "Hello. This is a collect call from [my recorded voice, sounding extremely tense: 'Greg']. If you accept the charges, please say 'yes' at the tone." [beep]

Nick: "..."

[Me screaming: "Nick! Say yes! Say yes!" untransmitted by robot operator]

Nick: "..."

Robot Operator: "I'm sorry. The person you called did not respond. Goodbye."

[call disconnected]

So, I tried again:

Robot Operator: "Hello. This is a collect call from [my recorded voice: 'It's Greg! Say yes!']. If you accept the charges, please say 'yes'..."

Nick: "Yes!"

Robot Operator: "...at the tone." [beep]

Nick: "..."

[Me screaming: "Say yes, Nick! Say yes!" untransmitted by robot operator]

Nick: "..."

Robot Operator: "I'm sorry. The person you called did not respond. Goodbye."

[call disconnected]

A third attempt yielded a nearly identical result (Operator: "Say yes..." / Nick: "Yes!" / Operator: "...at the tone" [beep] / Nick: "..."), but on the fourth try, I got Pat, who was able to come to my rescue.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Faithful GTS readers may note a similarity to Secret #176, in which I also had an automobile-related incident that occurred just as I was coming to a rest stop on the highway. I find my life is filled with little rhymes like that.

7/25/23

Hello, and welcome to the 202nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Last Thursday, when my boss saw the shirt I'm wearing in this photo, he said, "Wow! That's quite a shirt!"

"Thanks!" I said.

"You know," he continued, "it takes a certain type of person to be able to wear a shirt like that, and I know I'm not that type of person."

Now, I'm going to ask you all a question, and the answer may or may not be blindingly obvious to everybody here:

Was this a compliment or an insult?

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/27/23

Hello, and welcome to the 203rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In junior high, I played on the school basketball team, and by "played," I mean, I sat on the bench next to the coach, which is without question where I belonged. During one away game, we were up by about 30 points in the third quarter, and I remarked from my seat on the bench, "This game is in the bag!"

(I know! It was as if I had no concept of superstition or jinxes or even counting your chickens before they hatch.)

Well, as you might have guessed, the game was not in the bag. It was very much out of the bag. We actually didn't even have a bag. The other team rallied in the fourth quarter and wound up winning by two.

After the game, we sat dejectedly in the visitors' locker room, some of my teammates casting nasty glances at me, as if it were my fault (which, to be fair, it probably was, based solely on my "in the bag" remark). Our coach, Jeff Salisbury, was in the hallway, calmly, even cheerfully, asking a maintenance man about the location of the locker room light switch, which, as it turns out, didn't exist. All the lights in the facility were on a master control somewhere. No matter. Coach Salisbury asked our tallest player, Jim Pletan, to scramble up the lockers and manually unscrew the single lightbulb illuminating the locker room, which he did, plunging us into complete darkness.

"Can anybody see anything?" Coach Salisbury asked, still very calm.

"No," we all murmured in the dark (in more ways than one).

"This must be what you saw," Coach Salisbury clarified, his voice suddenly rising to a full-on bellow, "WHEN YOU HAD YOUR HEADS UP YOUR ASSES OUT THERE!"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/1/23

Hello, and welcome to the 204th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

On Friday, a fellow who said he was from the United Parcel Service Center in Portland, Maine, called to tell me he had a package he was attempting to deliver. I figured this was probably some sort of scam, but I decided to hear him out.

"I'm going to give you some information," he told me. "It's very important that you take down this information, so please secure a pen and a clean sheet of paper."

"Okay," I said.

"Do you have pen and paper?" he said.

"Yup."

"My name is Michael Henderson, and my employee identification number is MH0039."

"Okay."

"Your package tracking number is 14005200PCH."

"Okay."

"And the barcode number is 1017US."

"Okay."

"Can you read that back to me?"

I read it back to him.

"All right, sir. The package I have to deliver is from Publisher's Clearing House. Have you received a letter from them advising you of your six-million-dollar win?"

𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘦 𝘨𝘰, I thought. "No," I said.

"Oh? Well, I know they've been trying to reach you. They sent you two letters."

"I didn't get them."

"That's all right. But in order to complete delivery of this prize package, I'm going to need to collect some information from you, for tax purposes."

At that point, my work computer started chiming repeatedly, as if warning me that this was a scam, which I knew. My wife called from the other room, "What's going on?"

"There's something wrong with my computer," I replied. "And also, this guy on the phone is trying to scam me."

"I'm not trying to scam you, sir," said Michael Henderson. "I'm trying to deliver your Publisher's Clearing House prize. As I told you, these calls are monitored."

"Oh, they're 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘥?" I said. "I feel so much better now that I know your calls are 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘥."

"Sir, I don't appreciate your attitude," said Michael Henderson, quite indignant now. "I wish you a good day."

Then he hung up.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/3/23

Hello, and welcome to the 205th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I first moved to Manhattan, I briefly kept my car in New Jersey, in the work parking lot of a friend with whom Chad Anderson and I had been staying while we looked for jobs in New York. Then we had a rather spectacular falling out with that friend, but my car was still sitting there, in that workplace parking lot, which was not a tenable situation, as far as I was concerned. (I won't be naming this person, obviously, nor detailing the nature of our falling out, but if I ever did, hoo boy, would that be a cuckoo-bananas story.)

I knew I needed to get my car out of there, so I took a bus to New Jersey, and then walked to the parking lot, terrified the entire time that I would come across this friend with whom things had gone so badly. Then, to make things worse, my car wouldn't start, so I had to walk back into town to try to find a service station that could come give me a jump. (This was before cell phones, and before I joined Triple-A.)

As I walked along the sidewalk, I was exuding tension about the possibility of running into my friend, and the terrible, terrible scene that would surely follow. I was practically vibrating with dread. I passed a Chinese restaurant, and a dog that was tied up outside lunged at me and bit my leg, tearing my pants from knee to ankle. (Undoubtedly, it was responding to the smell of adrenaline pumping through my veins.)

Finally, I had something concrete at which I could direct all my built-up stress. I stormed into the restaurant, demanding to speak to the owner about the vicious dog outside. An elderly Chinese couple came out to speak to me (Elderly? Sure. They must have been in their 50s!), and when I told them what had happened, the wife said, "You shouldn't tease the dog."

"I wasn't teasing the dog!" I thundered. "I was walking by! Look at these pants!"

Quite agitated now, the couple rapidly spoke to each other in Chinese for a good minute, and then the husband said, "We pay for pants."

"That'll be fine," I said, softening a little, and feeling like a bit of a jerk for making such a fuss. (Still, the damned dog HAD bit me.)

"But you must sign something," he said.

"Sign something?"

"Yes, yes! Sign something!" He sat down and began writing on a piece of notebook paper. This is what he wrote:

"This says that everything is fine, and I will not make a problem about the dog or the restaurant anymore."

Which seemed fair enough, so I signed it and collected fifteen dollars from the wife (less than I had paid for the pants, but at this point, I just wanted to get on with my day and get out of this city).

A few minutes later, I got to a service station, and an attendant drove me back to my car and gave me a jump start. A few minutes after that, I was out of that town for good, and I never did run into my friend.

A week or so later, though, I did receive an awkward phone call from my friend, advising me that my car was gone from the lot in which it had been parked. I said I knew that already, because I had taken it to my mother's house in New Hampshire.

"Oh," said my former friend, ending the conversation, the last time we would ever speak.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/8/23

Hello, and welcome to the 206th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Sometimes, when I'm arguing with a member of my family about something inconsequential (but with diametrically opposed points of view), I'll say, absent all available evidence, "Look, essentially, we're saying the same thing."

This never goes over well.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/10/23

Hello, and welcome to the 207th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I got out of college, I very much wanted to work for the Coen brothers, who at that point in their careers had made only three movies—"Blood Simple," "Raising Arizona," and "Miller's Crossing"—the last of which was (and is) my favorite movie of all time.

I wrote a letter to the Coens' production company, acknowledging that the brothers usually work with the same fixed crew, but offering to take on unpaid P.A. work for their next film, doing jobs nobody else wanted, like for instance washing John Goodman's back if it needed washing. (Yes, that's the actual example I used.) Unsurprisingly, I received no response.

A month or so later, I sent another letter to the production company, letting them know that I'd heard filming had started on the Coens' fourth movie ("Barton Fink"), and that I'd waited all day at home for the production crew to come get me, but they hadn't shown up. I concluded the letter: "Were you not feeling well?"

(That last line was swiped directly from one of my favorite "Peanuts" strips of all time, seen in this photo.)

The production company did respond to my second letter, admiring my enthusiasm but noting (as I'd acknowledged in my first letter) that the Coen brothers always worked with the same crew. In other words, thanks but no thanks.

Their loss. (Little did they know they were passing up an opportunity to work with a future star of "Time Chasers.")

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/15/23

Hello, and welcome to the 208th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

As previously disclosed, in the summer of 1991, I worked on the crew of Time Chasers. Our first day of shooting took place at a Battle of Bennington reenactment in Bennington, Vermont, making liberal use of the reenactors' staged battle for our low-budget time travel movie.

Some of those reenactors were more invested in their roles than others. The film crew's presence had been cleared with event organizers and the town of Bennington itself, but nevertheless, a choleric general screamed at us for being civilians on his battlefield, and demanded that we remove our "infernal contraptions" from the field of fire.

The director, David Giancola, ever the diplomat, went over to talk to him, and offered him a small speaking role in the movie, which he accepted, serving up no further complaints about our presence.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/17/23

Hello, and welcome to the 209th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One summer, I lived in a motel in Clearwater, Florida.¹ The motel didn't have premium cable, but it did have a closed-circuit setup, so the check-in clerk could play a movie on a VCR behind the front desk, and anybody in any room could watch the movie by tuning into a specific channel. Movies were not on any schedule, with titles and start times seemingly at the whim of whoever was working the front desk.

Then, early in my stay, a tape got stuck in the front desk VCR, so that was the only thing that could be played for the rest of the summer. The tape had the following movies on it, in this order:

1) "Throw Momma from the Train"—Billy Crystal and Danny DeVito wring laughs out of murder and mayhem ("You don't have a cousin Patty!")
2) "Good Morning, Vietnam"—Robin Williams' manic comic energy skillfully utilized (for once) by director Barry Levinson
3) "The Hidden"—A pre-"Twin Peaks" Kyle MacLachlan plays an FBI agent who's secretly an alien law enforcer
4) "Bedroom Eyes"—A peeping tom gets embroiled in a murder plot (awful movie, lots of nudity)

That's it. Just those four movies, played at random times, but always in that order because the front desk tape could not be ejected.

I worked the night shift, and I could always count on one of those four movies playing on the motel's closed-circuit channel when I got home at dawn. There wasn't much else on at dawn, so I'd watch the movie as a way of winding down before I went to sleep. It didn't really matter which movie was playing; I knew them all by heart by the end of the summer.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹If you'd like to know why, see GTS #90.

8/20/23

Hello, and welcome to the 210th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This is my Wallace Shawn story: I was walking down a sidewalk and I passed a man walking the other way, consuming a giant grinder (or, since it was New York, a hero, I guess). A few steps after we had crossed paths, part of my brain began sending an urgent message to another part of my brain: "That was Wallace Shawn!" I whirled around. "Wallace Shawn!" I shouted. He turned in puzzlement. "Hrmph?" he said around a mouthful of bread and meat, and the mission control center in my brain went into full panic mode. I'd been a fan of Mr. Shawn for years, from long before "The Princess Bride" (not that he isn't wonderful in TPB, of course). Still, I could think of not one thing to say. "Good job," I finally managed, with a pathetic little wave. (In my brain's mission control, all the guys in white shirts and black ties chain-smoking cigarettes hung their heads in solemn shame.) Shawn nodded at me and continued on his way. The end.

(When I shared this story with my friend Cole, he said: "It lines up pretty well with Wallace Shawn's Greg Tulonen story, so I'm inclined to believe it.")

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/22/23

Hello, and welcome to the 211th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

The summer I turned 16, I worked on the kitchen crew at a summer camp in Poland, Maine. One morning, a co-worker was cleaning the counter with an ammonia-based cleaner, and then, when one of the more stubborn stains refused to come out, he decided to switch to bleach.

I'd never seen my boss move so quickly, shouting for all of us to "get down!" and running toward the counter with a large pitcher of water in hand. We all got down, but my co-worker just stood there, still holding the bleach cleaner, blinking in confusion at my boss.

"Get down, you stupid motherfucker!" my boss yelled at him, dumping the entire pitcher of water onto the counter. "You just made nerve gas!"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/24/23

Hello, and welcome to the 212th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Freshman year of high school, I had to go through a hazing ritual overseen by the seniors. This was sanctioned by the school and built into the curriculum. That year, all freshmen had to dress as elephants during the school day, but also had to time out in the morning to carry stones up a nearby hill (while still dressed as elephants) and spell out with those stones the graduation year of the seniors. We then had to paint the stones with whitewash—using our hands, not brushes.

In the afternoon, still dressed as elephants, we gathered for a school assembly in the gymnasium, where we were blindfolded and made to perform various humiliating tasks, including pushing eggs with our noses through piles of shaving cream on the floor.

The next year, we had a new principal. At an assembly held the first day of school, the new principal went over the new student handbook he had developed during the summer. The handbook contained various rules and clothing standards and codes of conduct, each of which he went over in excruciating detail. Like, the rule might be, "The wearing of shorts is not permitted," and the principal would discuss that particular rule at length, clarifying (in case any of us were unfamiliar with the meaning of "shorts") that it included Bermuda shorts and "jams" and bathing suits and cutoff jeans, adding that if it left the knee visible, then it wasn't allowed, and so on.

He did this for the entire handbook, taking five to ten minutes to expound upon each and every rule, and the thinking that had gone into its adoption.

The very last rule, which had caught my eye at the start of the assembly, was that there would be no freshmen hazing. I waited throughout the entire assembly for him to expound upon that one, since I had just gone through that mortifying process the previous year. But when he finally got to it, he just said, "There will be no freshmen hazing," adding nothing more, which was a marked contrast from every previous rule he had just gone over.

In retrospect, I think this was probably a good rule, as it just doesn't seem like a good practice for a school to sanction bullying behavior. But at the time, I felt like an unfairness had been committed. I also noted (and maybe this was just a coincidence) that the new principal had a son who just happened to be an incoming freshman.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/29/23

Hello, and welcome to the 213th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I've written a lot about my kids online, but I never use their names. Saddled with the last name Tulonen, they're going to be very easy to find once they start establishing an internet footprint for themselves (which they haven't yet), and I don't want that footprint to be cluttered up with lots of stuff I've written about them. I don't kid myself that the stuff I've written about them won't be easy enough to find, seeing as how I always use MY name, but it will require a certain degree of knowledge about their lives, and hopefully won't be too embarrassing.

Online, I often refer to my older child as "Otter," which came about this way: When Kate got pregnant, I started calling the baby "The Critter," which amused me and only me. I even had a page on my website devoted to The Critter, chronicling Kate's pregnancy. But Kate was not onboard for the Critter nickname, so she started calling him "Otter," which almost rhymes and is all-around more joyful.

When I launched my online comic, Actual Conversations With My Kids, transcribing actual conversations I've had with (or overheard between) my kids, I stuck with Otter for my older child, and settled on "Flapjack" for my younger child, just because I find "flapjack" to be a jaunty word, and, like "otter," somewhat joyful.

Today is Flapjack's 18th birthday, and thus, both kids are now legal adults, which blows my mind a little.

Happy birthday, Flapjack!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/31/23

Hello, and welcome to the 214th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once wrote comedy reviews for the magazine "Time Out New York." There were a lot of improv shows, which is its own kind of hell. I mean no offense to any improv comics on my feed. I mean, the format's fine, but night after night of it can really wear a fellow down. Also, as a writer, an unscripted show goes against my whole raison d'etre.

But it wasn't all improv. There was stand-up comedy and sketch comedy and experimental comedy. I reviewed it all. Nearly thirty years later, I'm still annoyed that my editor rewrote a line in one of my reviews praising a sketch in which the performer used a puppet to practice coming out to her mother. The editor rewrote it as "uses a puppet to come out to her mother," which is not the same thing, and made me fear that the performer would think I hadn't fully comprehended the sketch.

Speaking of performers taking issue with one of my reviews (which the puppet woman may or may not have), I once gave a mixed-to-negative review to a so-so improv troupe that routinely rejected innocuous audience suggestions (a big improv no-no), and served up occasional homophobic jokes. After my review ran, the leader of the troupe looked me up (not a lot of "Greg Tulonen"s in the Manhattan phonebook) and left me a message asking for a callback, because she was concerned that I may not have understood what they were trying to do.

I didn't return the call, figuring no good could possibly come of it.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/5/23

Hello, and welcome to the 215th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This is really my parents' secret, but my dad's not around anymore, and my mom's unlikely to share it here, so I'm going to go ahead. I do have a cameo (sort of).

In the summer of 1968, when my mom was at Bates College, she went to New York City as part of a class project to tutor kids in Harlem. My dad, who was not yet my dad and who in fact did not attend Bates (he was at Bowdoin) somehow talked his way into the class and went along. It was an eventful summer. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and (unrelatedly) my parents tutored a kid in Harlem named Gregory Wiggins, after whom I would be named, a little over a year later (although they didn't know that yet).

Also that summer, they went to see "The Indian Wants the Bronx," a one-act play by Israel Horovitz, which was the opening production of the new off-Broadway Astor Place Theatre. After the show, they went backstage to meet the cast, which included a very young Al Pacino, who at the time was not at all famous, but would soon go on to star in "The Godfather" (although they didn't know that yet).

The entire time they were talking to him backstage, Pacino was clad only in his underwear.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/7/23

Hello, and welcome to the 216th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Once, when my dad and stepmom were visiting our apartment, Kate asked my dad to help us move a sleep sofa from one room to another. He agreed readily enough, and all was going well until we passed through the kitchen doorway into the hallway, getting the sofa almost all the way through, but jamming it thoroughly and seemingly irreversibly in the door frame with one inch to go. You would think that with only one inch of sofa jammed in a doorway and five or six feet of sofa not jammed in a doorway, that you could just sort-of wiggle the whole thing free, but no. It was stuck fast.

The result was eerie and curious: With only one inch jammed in the doorframe, the sofa seemed to be hovering five feet in the air, perfectly parallel to the ground, at the top of a flight of stairs, unbudgeable (either forwards or backwards), no matter how hard we pushed or pulled or yanked or shoved.

(At this point in the narrative, Douglas Adams fans may be reminded of a plot thread in his novel "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency," in which a sofa gets irreversibly stuck on a staircase, and according to computer simulations, would be physically impossible to remove.)

(Others may be reminded of Ross Geller shouting, "Pivot!")

We left the sofa floating in mid-air and went out to dinner. When we got home, the sofa, unsurprisingly, had not moved, nor was it any more moveable. So, Kate called the furniture store where we'd purchased the sofa, whose employees had delivered it without any problems at all. The owner (who'd been about to close up for the night) came right over to the apartment, did something fancy with moving straps, and un-budged the sofa with seeming ease.

We gave him a hundred-dollar tip.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/12/23

Hello, and welcome to the 217th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Early one Saturday morning when I was eight years old, there was a knock on the front door. My mom (Joanne Tulonen) was sleeping, so I answered it like a big boy, and it was the papergirl making her weekly collection. I told her my mother was sleeping and asked if she could please come back tomorrow, which was fine.

I was so proud of myself for managing this interaction on my own without having to bother my mom, I went into her bedroom to wake her up and tell her all about it.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/14/23

Hello, and welcome to the 218th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

We recycle our returnable bottles and cans via CLYNK, a Maine-based bottle redemption company that partners with Hannaford supermarkets. It's very simple. You put your returnables in a green CLYNK bag affixed with a barcode sticker linked to your account, and then drop off your bag at one of the many CLYNK drop-off locations, where it will be sorted, the money for the returns automatically added to your CLYNK account.

Except, a while back, I noticed that our CLYNK account balance wasn't going up as much as I expected. Each full CLYNK bag returns around four or five dollars, but after many drop-offs, our balance remained relatively flat.

So, I called CLYNK to find out what was going on, and the first thing they asked me for was the serial numbers on the barcode stickers on the bags I had dropped off.

"I have no idea," I answered. Obviously.

"Then we can't help you."

Well, all right. From that day forward, I always took a picture of every barcode sticker before affixing it to a bag and dropping the bag off. So, the next time I noticed that our balance wasn't adding up as expected, I called CLYNK, and when they asked me for the serial numbers, I rattled them off.

"Oh," the CLYNK representative said, clearly surprised. "Yes, I see those in our system. I'll make sure those balances get added to your account right away."

After that, we never again had a problem with our CLYNK balance not going up.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/19/23

ello, and welcome to the 219th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

You may have noticed that many of my secrets involve my father. Well, today would have been his 76th birthday, and my favorite story about him is not one I tell a lot (though I did share it at his memorial service). It's not a funny story, or even that remarkable. It's just my favorite image of him, the one I still carry around with me when I think about him.

I was about 10. We were in a drug store, and at the spur of the moment, he decided to buy a kite. This was just a cheap, plastic drug-store kite that came with a 500-foot string, but our next stop was the hardware store, where we bought 10,000 feet of string—so long, it came with its own winch.

We went home, attached the 10,000-foot string, and got the kite aloft. We stood on the deck, letting the kite get higher and higher and higher, the winch spinning around like we were fishermen who had just hooked a marlin. My father got out some work gloves, because the string was playing out so fast it was burning our fingers.

The kite got smaller and smaller in the sky, until I couldn't even see it anymore. But I could still feel it, straining against the string like an invisible animal trying to break free. I remember feeling amazed that I was attached to something so far away.

And then, all at once, the string did break. It hung slack in my hand, all the tension lost and the kite completely gone. But I didn't care. It had been so exciting. And my father had been absolutely right: 10,000 feet was so much more fun than 500.

In the final years of his life, as he was succumbing to Alzheimer's, my father reminded me of that kite, getting further and further away until I couldn't see him at all anymore. But the funny thing is, when the string finally did break, in May of 2015, I realized it hadn't changed anything. I felt just as connected to him as always, as if there were an invisible string, stronger than the thickest steel cable, and a hell of a lot longer than 10,000 feet.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/21/23

Hello, and welcome to the 220th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One day, years ago, when I was working as a teacher at UMass Amherst, I found myself walking briskly down the hallway in a foul mood, having had a particularly frustrating day of unresponsive students and incompetent administrators. I was thinking to myself: "I'm just unlucky. I'm just so goddamned unlucky!" And just as that thought formed in my mind—at that exact instant—a Coke machine by which I was walking emitted a heaving groan and spewed (approximately) twenty-seven dollars in change at my feet.

Kneeling down to pick up the coins, I looked up to see that a passing student had stopped, and was studying me with great interest. "I'm taking an ethics class," she explained. "I just wanted to see what you're going to do." To be clear: This was not a social experiment set up for her ethics class. The machine just happened to break as I was passing, and she just happened to be near.

"I'm keeping the money," I assured her, my pockets now bulging with coins, and continued on my way.

This incident occurred shortly after the hit-and-run death of my good friend Jeff Gilbert (which happened 26 years ago yesterday), and while I'm not a terribly religious or spiritual person, I've always assumed that the Coke machine's sudden malfunction was his ghostly prank, nudging me out of my bad mood with some pointed ribbing from the afterlife.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/26/23

Hello, and welcome to the 221st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I'm reading, I tend to take in whole words at a time, or even clusters of words. It allows me to read pretty fast, but it also means I almost always miss typos, and sometimes even misread things entirely. Last week, I saw the headline "Freed Americans Returning from Iran," which I somehow read as "Fred Armisen Returning from Iran," and I thought to myself, "Why is that news?"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/28/23

Hello, and welcome to the 222nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Here's another secret that will come as news to my mother, nearly forty years after the fact. Late one night when I was in high school, I was out driving with my friends Louis and Carolyn—Louis behind the wheel. There weren't that many places to drive in Wilsall, Montana (pop. 237), so we made our way to neighboring Clyde Park, where Louis decided to engage in a little impromptu drag-racing with a car full of Clyde Park teens cruising Main Street. This endeavor was almost immediately broken up by the arrival of state police cruisers, lights flashing, who attempted to pull us over. But instead of pulling over, Louis initiated a police chase, careening recklessly through the back streets of Clyde Park, doggedly pursued by the troopers. Two blocks ahead of the cops and driving very fast, Louis turned a corner and immediately pulled into a random driveway, killed the engine and the lights, and yelled for us to get down, so we would look like any other car parked in any other driveway. We hunkered down and waited, occasionally seeing red and blue lights flashing as the troopers cruised slowly back and forth through the neighborhood, looking for their lost quarry. If they had parked their cruisers and gotten out to look for us on foot, they could have nabbed us easily enough, but they didn't, and after about half an hour, they gave up and went away.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/3/23

Hello, and welcome to the 223rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once flew from New York to L.A. to visit Jim Nida, and together, we drove up to San Francisco to visit Sue Melo. My friend Jeremy Braddock (whom I hadn't seen in about three years) also lived in San Francisco at the time, but rather than call him or otherwise alert him to my presence in the city (you know, like a normal person), I instead thought it would be funny to go to his apartment and slip the following note under his door:

𝗝𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗺𝘆:
𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂? 𝗜 𝘄𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗻'𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘂𝗽. 𝗢𝗵 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹.
-𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗴 𝗧𝘂𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗻

So, that's what I did, much to Jeremy's confusion and consternation (I later learned). For all I know, Jeremy was home at the time I left the note, but I didn't bother to knock.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/5/23

Hello, and welcome to the 224th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

A number of my secrets have concerned interactions with (or sightings of) celebrities, including Gilbert Gottfried, Mr. Rogers, Robert Cormier, Hulk Hogan, Kevin McHale, Penn Jillette and Lou Reed, Richard Brautigan, Peter Tork and Peter Scolari, Tom Dundee, Jonathan Richman, Ethan Hawke, and Wallace Shawn—not to mention my parents' encounter with Al Pacino, which, okay, I just mentioned.

But by far my least interesting celebrity encounter (and thus saved for last) occurred soon after I graduated college. I was on my way to an unpromising job interview in New York City's West Village, but the address had either been relayed to me incorrectly or I'd transcribed it incorrectly, because I was having no luck finding the place. I stopped to ask a random stranger on the sidewalk for directions, but he had no insight into the company I was looking for or the address I had written down. As he was talking, I realized he was the actor John Heard, whom most people would probably recognize from "Home Alone," but whom I recognized from "After Hours."

"Are you John Heard?" I asked him.

"I am," he acknowledged, "but I still don't know where this place you're looking for is."

"I like your movies," I told him (meaning exclusively that I liked "After Hours," but I didn't say that).

He said nothing, and gave me a look that unequivocally told me to get lost.

But I already was.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/10/23

Hello, and welcome to the 225th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the summer of 1991, I had a job working for a film distribution company, using a small, hand-held mechanical counter to secretly track everybody who came into one particular theater to see one particular movie. This would help the film distribution company ensure that the true count matched the theater's reported ticket sales. Counting theater patrons isn't easy, as people come and go to buy concessions, go to the bathroom, etc., but I devised the complicated system of using my fingers to track their comings and goings. In any case, I ended up seeing "The Addams Family" about 27 times that summer, so I assume the theater staff must have thought I was a huge weirdo, or, you know, just a really big fan of Raul Julia.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/12/23

Hello, and welcome to the 226th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One summer, my mom (Joanne Tulonen) and I took care of Josette Audoire's dog, Tyena, while Josette was in France. Tyena was a huge black lab, sweet and dumb and fiercely loyal. She formed an intense attachment to my mom, sprawling out on the roof of my mom's car whenever my mom was inside, presumably to prevent her from driving away somewhere and leaving Tyena behind like Josette had.

Tyena liked to chase the ducks, and the ducks liked to play a little game with her: Tyena would run into the lake, barking wildly at a raft of ducks, who would quack lackadaisically, flutter up into the air, and settle back down on the water a few yards away. Tyena would follow, dog-paddling with all her might, and the whole process would start again. When they got to the middle of the lake, the ducks would take actual flight, flying high and far away, and it was hard, as they rose into the air, not to hear their raucous babble as mocking laughter. Poor Tyena would swim frantic circles in the water, unsure how to get back home. We'd call to her, but that only made her more frantic. So, someone would have to go out in a canoe and guide her back to shore.

This happened again and again, all summer.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/17/23

Hello, and welcome to the 227th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

The night "The Big Lebowski" opened, I was out to dinner at an Italian restaurant with a large group of friends. Soon after ordering, I suddenly remembered that the Coen brothers had a new movie out, and expressed regret that I was missing opening night. As it turns out, there was one other Coen brothers true believer among us (Sonia Nairne), and much to the rest of the party's bemusement, Sonia and I called the waiter over to ask for our meals to be prepared to go, and for their cost to be tallied separately from the rest of our party. Somehow, we smuggled our full Italian dinners into the movie theater, where we sat in the front row, eating pasta and watching Jeff Bridges not bowl.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/19/23

Hello, and welcome to the 228th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was in grad school, smart phones hadn't been invented and wifi wasn't yet a thing, so if you wanted to check your email or browse the internet while you were on campus, you had to use one of the school's publicly available computers. One day, I walked into a computer lab and saw, sitting at one of the computers, my good friend Sejal Shah (pictured here with me in our ruffian days, wantonly breaking the law). Rather than greet her or otherwise alert her to my presence (you know, like a normal person), I simply sat in the seat next to her. Sejal was so deeply absorbed in what she was doing, she didn't notice me, which was hardly surprising. Sejal has the ability to focus completely on the thing directly in front of her, to the exclusion of everything else. (That may explain why she was so very often late to things.)

Sitting next to her, unnoticed, I sent her an email with the subject line "just so you know..." and the message "...I'm sitting directly to your right." Then I went about my business, browsing the internet and catching up on emails. After about twenty minutes, I heard Sejal exclaim, "Oh my god!" because she had finally read my email and turned to her right.

Today is Sejal's birthday. A nice way to celebrate would be to buy her wonderful book, "This Is One Way to Dance."

Happy birthday, Sejal!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/24/23

Hello, and welcome to the 229th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One Halloween, I went trick-or-treating dressed as a spy. My costume consisted of a trench coat and sunglasses, and an ID pinned to my lapel listing my profession as "SPY." (My head canon backstory was that I'd lost my forged identity papers and had been forced to use my real identity papers when applying for my ID badge.) My trick-or-treat bag was a briefcase handcuffed to my wrist, with the words "TOP SECRET" printed on it with big white letters.

In other words, I was not the world's subtlest spy.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/26/23

Hello, and welcome to the 230th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was ten years old, I went trick-or-treating with a friend, and one of the houses we stopped at was occupied by college students, who were clearly unaware it was Halloween night. They were incredibly startled when we appeared at the door, to the point of freaking out and rushing to block our view of their kitchen table. Several of them stood shoulder to shoulder in front of it, laughing hysterically, their backs to us, shouting "Don't let them see! Don't let them see!" Meanwhile, the young woman who had answered the door gigglingly explained that they didn't have any candy.

Later, as we continued down the sidewalk, my friend (who'd clearly been brooding about the incident) remarked that they'd probably been trying to hide the fact that they actually DID have candy. I kept my opinion to myself, but my thought was that they were probably trying to hide the fact that they had a whole lot of drugs.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/31/23

Hello, and welcome to the 231st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In 2008, I handmade a werewolf halloween costume that I'm still pretty proud of. My kids, who were three and five, were terrified of it, and refused to let me wear it in their presence, which made it difficult for me to go trick-or-treating with them in costume—the reason I'd made the costume in the first place. (They eventually got over it, when they realized I could scare OTHER people with it.)

One other detail about this costume: The lower jaw is a separate piece, attached via elastic to my own lower jaw, thereby ensuring that the wolf's mouth moved when my mouth moved. For some reason, this has always been very important to me, that any Halloween mask has accurate mouth movements. When I was nine, I went as a scarecrow, using a pillowcase as my mask, and cutting holes for my eyes and mouth. At the mouth hole, I used masking tape to adhere the top part to my upper lip and the bottom part to my lower lip, so the scarecrow's mouth would move with mine.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/2/23

Hello, and welcome to the 232nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I know, I know, we're well into week two of this so-called Halloween "Week," but what the hell. One more Halloween story, just to keep us warm. It's also an election secret, which will be our theme next week.

In third grade, around Halloween, our music teacher read us the "Double, double, toil and trouble" scene from Shakespeare's "Macbeth," in which the witches list all the nasty ingredients of their potion. Our teacher then tasked us with creating a performance piece with her, inspired by that scene.

To get started, she asked us each to write our own list of magic potion ingredients. This is how my list began:

One bloated frog
One human brain
One wounded dog
That is in great pain

I don't remember the rest of it, but I know that it went on like that, with more grisly and sadistic ingredients, utilizing the ABAB rhyme scheme.

When we were done with our lists, our teacher read them all in front of the class two by two, asking us each time to vote with raised hands on the better list, narrowing down the bracket until we got to a winner. The winner would get to be the witch (or wizard) in the performance piece she was crafting, wearing a pointy hat and standing behind a big cauldron, reading off the winning list of ingredients as others danced around the cauldron and mimed adding them to the pot.

I very much wanted to be the wizard, and the teacher was clearly taken with my list. I think it was the only one that really got into the spirit of the grossness (others, honest to god, had ingredients like potato chips and candy), and mine was the only one—the only one—that rhymed. She leaned into her performance of my list every time it came up for a vote, and with her thumb on the scale, I made it into the final two.

Then my list was voted off, which obviously annoyed her. She read both lists again and asked for a re-vote. Same result. Even more annoyed, she read both lists a third time, demanding that the class "really listen this time!" The third vote did not alter the outcome. My list lost.

Exasperated, she thrust the pointy hat into my hands and said, "Never mind the vote. Greg's the wizard!"

Full disclosure: I happened to agree with the teacher that my list had been the best, but I had enough humility to understand that an injustice had been perpetrated. The rest of the class eyed me sullenly, as if a sitting president of the United States had just declared the results of a free and fair election to be illegitimate. I was mortified.

When the time came, I performed my wizard role with gusto, but it was tainted by the fact that I hadn't really earned it, and I could feel a sour ball of shame and embarrassment in the pit of my stomach as I recited my list.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/7/23

Hello, and welcome to the 233rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In 1982, my mom and I moved from Massachusetts to Montana, when my mom took a high school teaching job in the tiny town of Wilsall (population: 237). One of our first nights there, we were invited to a barbecue at the school committee chairman's house, where my mom got involved in a volleyball game. Her first serve veered off out of bounds to the left.

"Not so far left, Joanne," the school committee chairman advised with a dark chuckle. "This is Reagan country!" Everybody laughed.

A little later in the game, my mom knocked the ball out of bounds to the right, generating some more ribbing from the school committee chairman.

"Well, you didn't like it when I went left either," said my mom, adding: "I've always been more of a middle-of-the-roader" (which was a bit of a lie). This got a big laugh too, though not necessarily from the school committee chairman.

Wilsall was indeed Reagan country. In 1984, when Reagan was running for re-election, the high school held a secret-ballot mock presidential election among the students, and mine was the sole vote for the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, which I guess made me the Minnesota of Wilsall High School—Minnesota being the only state Mondale would capture in the actual election.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/9/23

Hello, and welcome to the 234th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In 2016, immediately after Rand Paul dropped out of the presidential race, NPR conducted an interview with Matt Kibbe, senior advisor for a Libertarian superPAC that had been supporting him. I was in my car, listening with great interest, because I usually find Libertarians to be vaguely hilarious, and Mr. Kibbe did not disappoint.

He began with a loose (if somewhat garbled) declaration of principles with which I can find little fault: "...opposition to permanent war and nation building and a lot of the neoconservative policies that are coming out of both parties, a respect for civil liberties and an understanding that the genius of America comes from free individuals, not government from the top down."

But when asked if, after recent terrorist incidents, there was still enough of an anti-interventionist sentiment in the Republican party to ensure U.S. non-involvement in any additional foreign conflicts, Kibbe responded: "I think there is, and it's almost generational, that the younger you are, the more interested you are in a new look at foreign policy. And Rand was really trying to get us to go back to Reagan, to show more restraint and to understand that sometimes doing the wrong thing does damage and actually empowers terrorists."

At that point, I nearly drove off the road, I was laughing so hard. Back to Reagan? More restraint? So we're pretending Iran-Contra wasn't a thing? Or all that "evil empire" rhetoric? And we're just ignoring the Reagan campaign's secret negotiations with Iranian terrorists to keep American hostages in captivity longer? Or how about the bungled Marine presence in Lebanon? The invasion of Grenada? The bombing of Libya? The backing of the Afghan mujahideen?

Anyway, had I been the NPR reporter conducting this particular interview, I would have had to cut the feed to compose myself.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/14/23

Hello, and welcome to the 235th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When Chad and I were moving into our first apartment in New York City, we parked our cars outside the building on Third Avenue and spent a couple of hours unloading all our stuff, which didn't seem to bother anybody in the slightest. We didn't even get tickets. So, when my dad and stepmom came to visit a few months later, and my dad asked my stepmom to stay with the car while he brought their bags up, I assured them with confidence that their car would be fine if they both came up to the apartment together. I was very excited to show off my new place, you see, so up they both came, at my insistence, taking a few minutes to look things over, and then going up on the roof with me to check out the view. On the roof, my dad peered down to the street, and saw that sometime in the previous five minutes, the car had been towed.

The next few hours were not happy ones. We walked to the impound lot on the West Side, my dad seething with rage, but trying hard not to direct his anger at me, even though there was a way to look at the whole situation in which it was my fault. (There was no other way to look at it.) He instead directed his ire at the meter maids and towing crews we passed along the way, shouting at all of them (to their utter bafflement) that they were thieves and robbers.

At the impound lot, we waited for an excruciatingly long time before having to pay an exorbitant fee to get the car back. My dad had been in a terrifyingly terrible mood throughout this entire ordeal, but he cheered up immediately and immensely as soon as he was back behind the wheel of his car.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/16/23

Hello, and welcome to the 236th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One day, in early April 2005, as I was driving home from my work in Springfield, Massachusetts through the streets of Northampton, I happened to see a big city tow truck hooking up a car to be towed. "Look at that," I said (out loud) to myself. "Some poor bastard's getting his car towed." I didn't give it another thought as I continued on my way, but savvy readers have likely divined that it will be an important detail later in this story. (You guys are so smart!)

When I got home, I was surprised and concerned to discover that Kate and our two-year-old were not there, but there was a message on our voicemail which began (ominously enough) "This is the Northampton Police Department," and I could feel my heart speeding up at those words. The message continued: "You need to go pick up your wife and son. Their car has been impounded and they're waiting for you on Market Street in Northampton." That was it, nothing more. This was before the prevalence of cellphones, so it was all the information I had to go on.

As quickly as I could, I made my way to Market Street, where I found Kate and our child waiting on the sidewalk, and learned that the registration on Kate's car had expired at the end of March (just a few days earlier). Naturally, the officer who had pulled her over for the expired tag, in accordance with his duties protecting and serving the public, had impounded the car and left Kate and our two-year-old stranded by the side of the road, promising to call and leave a message for me to come pick them up when I got home from work an hour later.

Oh! I should also mention that Kate was five months pregnant with our second child.

So yeah, the tow truck I had seen on my way home had been hooking up OUR car to be towed, but somehow, I had missed seeing Kate and our son standing next to it.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/21/23

Hello, and welcome to the 237th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When people ask me what I do for a living, I usually say I work for a non-profit rather than I work for a health insurance company, even though both statements are true. The reason for this is, if you tell someone you work for a non-profit, they'll probably think you're a good guy, but if you tell someone you work for a health insurance company, they'll probably think you should die in a ditch.

11/23/23

Hello, and welcome to the 238th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

As you may have intuited from the existence of this series, memory is so very important to me. The stories we collect about ourselves help define who we are, and—outside something happening to someone in my family—the idea of losing those memories is just about the worst thing I can imagine.

In 2011, four years after my father's Alzheimer's diagnosis, I visited him and stepmom for the weekend by myself, without Kate or the kids. My dad adored the kids, but their manic energy could overwhelm him, and more often than not, he'd wind up shutting down. Also, the speech processing center of his brain was pretty much shot by then, so it was extremely difficult for him to speak without devolving into stuttering gibberish, and it was extremely difficult for him to understand words being spoken to him.

All of which is to say that I hadn't had a real conversation with my father, a conversation in which he'd understood what I was saying and I'd understood what he was saying, in about three years. And there were times, years earlier, when we could be remarkably in sync, could communicate with a glance from across the room or read one another's thoughts before the other could express them. I still remember the game of Pictionary in which I successfully guessed "alarm clock" after my dad had drawn a single curved line.

However, that weekend, I was able to sit at a table with my dad and have an actual conversation, one in which he teased out enough words and sounds for me to grasp his meaning, and one in which I was able to engage his attention directly enough for him to understand me.

After about twenty minutes of difficult but pleasurable talk, he looked over at my stepmother Pat, who was standing in the room but facing away from us, bent over to examine my dad's new iPad, which was resting in a chair. In other words, to put it somewhat indelicately, her butt was pointing directly at us.

I watched my father taking in this scene, then caught his eye and arched an eyebrow. It was the kind of look I might have given him twenty years earlier to let him know I knew what he was thinking. He burst out laughing, and just for a second it felt like he was just the same as he used to be.

"I can't help it!," he said, clear as a bell, "I love her."

So, yeah, the idea of losing memories terrifies me. The idea of losing language terrifies me. Who would I be without my memories? Without my words? A blank. A husk. And yet... As long as we're still drawing air, as long as there's that possibility of genuine human connection... Who'd want to miss that?

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/28/23

Hello, and welcome to the 239th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

At camp, I made a clay rocket ship on its launch pad. The arts & crafts director fired all our clay creations in a kiln, and then put them out on display. I was so proud of my rocket, but the clay it was made from was caucasian flesh-colored, and it looked like... well, if you've seen Jeff Bezos' rockets, you know what it looked like. I overheard some counselors snickering about my sculpture, and I instantly understood what I had (unintentionally) made. I was so embarrassed, I took my rocket out into the woods and smashed it.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/30/23

Hello, and welcome to the 240th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Thirty-one years (minus three days) ago, I ordered Japanese food delivery for dinner. This was in New York, when I lived with Chad Anderson, but Chad was still at work. (We worked at the same place, but I had an 8-5 shift and Chad worked 10-7.) When the food arrived, I buzzed the delivery guy up, and waited and waited and waited, but he did not come to my door, and he kept not coming to my door for many minutes.

Finally, I went out to look for him, and found him wandering around the second floor, looking for our apartment (5B). I paid him, took the food, went back up to the apartment, and discovered that I had locked myself out.

It was pretty close to seven o'clock, so I figured I'd just wait for Chad to get home. I camped out in front of our apartment door and ate my food with a fair amount of enjoyment. While I was eating, I heard our phone ring inside the apartment, and my mother leaving a message telling me that my aunt Patty had had her baby. (Happy birthday, cousin Andrew, three days early!)

Seven o'clock came and went, which was fine. Chad often had to work late, and besides, it could sometimes take a while for New York City subways to get people where they needed to be. But by 8:30, I was starting to get a little stressed. This was well before cellphones, obviously, and if I went to go call Chad from a payphone, I wouldn't be able to get back into the building, and it was December in New York, and I didn't have a jacket on.

Finally, I decided to brave it, and I made my way to the nearest payphone to call our workplace. The woman who answered told me that Chad had just left. "Awesome," I said, "'cause I'm locked out of the apartment."

"Oh," she said, "he told me he was going to see 'Reservoir Dogs' with a friend," and I thought she must be kidding, but she wasn't.

So, I went back to my building, and fortunately, our new neighbor across the hall was arriving at the same time, so she let me in, but I still had no way of getting back into the apartment. She told me I could hang out in her apartment if I wanted, but she was going to bed. That sounded better than waiting in the hall, so I took her up on it.

When we entered her apartment, I discovered that she did not yet have any furniture. She went to bed, and I sat on a rolled-up carpet in the living room, listening for Chad to come back.

When Chad finally got home, he found an empty apartment, with all the lights (and the TV) on. He took in that scene for a second, and then I came in the door behind him, baffling him further.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/5/23

Hello, and welcome to the 241st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I was once in a bar in San Francisco with Suzanne Melo Udell and some other Middlebury folks, and I was just intoxicated enough to approach a woman I didn't know and start talking, but I possessed so little "game," I could think of nothing to say to her except to ask if I could have a drag off the cigarette she was smoking. (This is back when you could smoke in bars.) Of course, the traditional thing among smokers is to ask if you could bum a whole other cigarette, but I didn't smoke, so I just took my drag (which she proffered without hesitation), handed the cigarette back to her, and went back to my friends.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/7/23

Hello, and welcome to the 242nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In my 20s, my right big toe developed an ingrown toenail. I went to a podiatrist, and he told me that he would have to make a large pie-shape cut in the center of the nail to allow the sides to retreat from their ingrownness. He gave me a shot of novocaine, waited about 15 minutes, and then asked me if I could feel anything.

"Yes," I said.

He stroked the tip of my toe gently with my finger. "Do you feel that?" he said.

"Yes," I assured him.

"Well, you're probably just feeling the pressure," he decided, "not any actual sensation."

He produced a pair of scissors and inserted a blade deep under my toenail, which felt exactly like a scissors blade being inserted deep under my toenail. I grunted and bucked my leg.

"Don't kick me!" the podiatrist admonished, instructing his nurse to hold down my leg while he completed the procedure.

"I can feel it!" I shouted.

"I'm almost done," he said, performing the next snip of the nail, and that was it. He actually had been almost done, but I couldn't bring myself to thank him.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/12/23

Hello, and welcome to the 243rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once had a dream about a group of primitive gods living on Mars. I was not actually in this dream—that is, I was not present in the narrative of the dream in any capacity, even as an observer. Also, this dream was entirely in Spanish.

Now, for story purposes, it's important that you understand the following fact about me: I do not know Spanish.

Since I don't know Spanish, I couldn't fully understand what was going on (the "I" being somewhat theoretical, since—again— I was not a character in this dream). Also, it seems extremely unlikely that the dream was actually in Spanish, since my brain was generating the dream's content, and my brain doesn't know any Spanish. However, the theoretical observer of the dream (which, again, was not me) understood that Spanish was being spoken.

Yes, this is all very confusing, but maybe I was having somebody else's dream by mistake.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/14/23

Hello, and welcome to the 244th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One Friday in December, many years ago, my kindergarten teacher announced that on Monday, our student teacher would be leading the class in a candy-cane-making project. I was immediately intrigued. Candy cane making? How would that work? Would we need a stove? How would we make the bendy part? How would we put the stripes on? I peppered our student teacher with these questions and more, but she just grinned and said, "You'll see."

I thought about it all weekend, and on Monday, I woke up sick. I mean, really, really sick. I WANTED to go to school and find out how to make candy canes, but I was genuinely too sick to go. My mom dropped me off at my grandparents' house, and I begged my grandmother, who worked at the school as an aide, to find out all she could about the candy-cane-making project that was going on in the kindergarten classroom that day.

I remember dejectedly watching "Romper Room" that morning, a lame show even in the best of times, and wishing I were at school making candy canes with my classmates. Life truly sucked, but I held onto a slender hope throughout the day that my grandmother would be coming home with candy-cane-making supplies and instructions.

Instead, my grandmother came home with mimeographed black and white drawings of candy canes, along with some colored pencils I could use to color them in. I was astonished and furious. This was obviously some stupid make-work whipped up for the sick kid while my classmates had been busy making real candy canes. A dumb coloring-book task could NOT have been what our teacher had been talking about when he'd told us we'd be making candy canes. What the hell was this? No.

When I returned to school, I saw the other kids' candy cane coloring efforts taped to the wall (I hadn't colored mine out of general principal), and I made subtle inquiries, trying to confirm if this coloring project had ACCOMPANIED the making of actual candy canes, or if coloring had been the whole thing.

Coloring had been the whole thing, and it mystifies me to this day that this didn't enrage anybody but me.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/19/23

Hello, and welcome to the 245th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Before Kate and I were even dating, I agreed to feed her cats while she and her roommate were away at a conference for a week, and also administer daily meds to one of the cats, and also teach all her classes, and also teach all her roommate's classes. (Is there any doubt I was smitten?)

I also agreed to oversee her voluminous VCR taping schedule. She had already pre-programmed all the necessary recordings into her VCR, but there was some manual tape swapping involved, as Kate divided her recordings into days ("Monday shows," "Tuesday shows," etc.). There was also some input switching required, because some shows were on broadcast networks and could be recorded with a direct coaxial input, and some were on cable networks, and thus had to come from the cable box.

Nothing about this seemed odd or excessive to me. Before the dawn of streaming, Kate and I both had rigorous television recording standards. When I lived in New York, I learned how to program my cable box to switch channels at a designated time, so I could record shows on two different networks while I was away (something most people assured me was impossible).

Years later, with the rise of DVRs, Kate and I were told by our cable company that their cable boxes were not compatible with TiVo, as there was no way for the TiVo to tell the cable box which channel it needed to record. Nevertheless, we figured out a way to jury-rig for our TiVo to send a signal to a small piece of hardware mounted in front of our cable box, acting as a kind of remote control that could change the cable box's channel. We had three TVs set up in the house, and four TiVos. (This was a time when Kate and I really, really liked TV.)

I once called TiVo customer support to address a technical issue (an issue our cable company would not address, because they kept assuring us—falsely—that their cable boxes were not compatible with TiVo). The TiVo agent looked up our region and said, "You know, your cable company does have three other customers with TiVos, and... oh, wait a minute... they're all you!"

Eventually, streaming came along, making all of this effort somewhat obsolete, but by then, Kate and I weren't watching as much TV anymore, partly because we'd aged out of the target demographic most TV shows are pitched to, but mostly because we have other concerns taking up more of our time—you know, like kids and careers and stuff. We still love TV, but it's much more tamped down these days.

Anyway, this has all been a somewhat meandering precursor to announcing the fact that today's Kate's birthday. Happy birthday, love!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/21/23

Hello, and welcome to the 246th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I started working at Community Health Options on Christmas Eve, 2013. It was a brand-new non-profit jumping headfirst into Obama's brand-new Affordable Care Act, operating out of the third floor of 150 Mill Street in Lewiston, Maine. My first day was a crash-course intensive study in all things health insurance. When we broke for lunch, I headed downstairs for a sandwich at Da Vinci's restaurant on the first floor of the building, and when I came back, I discovered the office had been abandoned and gutted, all the people and furniture completely gone. For the briefest instant, I thought maybe I was on a prank show, or perhaps the company had been raided by the FBI or something. I was genuinely flummoxed.

Then I realized I had simply returned to the wrong floor.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/25/23

Hello, and welcome to the 247th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

As a kid, I could always guess what my (wrapped) Christmas presents were. This drove my mother (Joanne Tulonen) crazy, and she tried to do things like put the presents in inappropriately sized boxes or wrap them up with inessential extras affecting the present's shape, but I was not deterred. I was always spot-on with my guesses.

To be clear: I wasn't cheating. I didn't snoop around for presents that weren't yet wrapped, or unwrap any presents before Christmas morning. I was just an exceptional guesser.

Junior year in college, I asked for a portable CD player for Christmas, which my mother told me she didn't think she could swing, which was fine. But Christmas morning, in addition to all the presents under the tree, I happened to notice that under my mother's bed, there was a wrapped, portable-CD-player-shaped present that had NOT been placed under the tree, with my name on the tag.

Later that morning, after most of the presents had been distributed, my mother asked me (a bit too casually), "Have you opened all your presents?"

"Well, there's still that present under your bed," I said.

She was so mad!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." Merry Christmas! We'll see you next time.

12/28/23

Hello, and welcome to the 248th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When Chad and I got an apartment in New York, I called TimeWarner Cable (now known as Spectrum—please, hold your "boos"s to the end). The apartment already had cable via the previous tenant, but we assumed that would be shutting off soon, as soon as that previous tenant's final payment expired. The agent I spoke to informed me that it would take six weeks to get a tech out to our apartment to install cable for us, which seemed entirely unsatisfactory. Couldn't we just transfer ownership of the cable that was ALREADY THERE? No. No, we could not.

The very next day, a TimeWarner tech arrived at our apartment to turn off the previous tenant's cable. We asked him if he could turn it back on for us, as we were happy to start paying for cable immediately, but he said no, that was somebody else's department. (Such mind-bogglingly stupid inefficiencies seem to be a hallmark of giant corporations, don't they?)

Six weeks later, on the day our tech was scheduled to arrive, we were given a window of 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. to expect him. (I know this phenomenon has been commented upon ad nauseam, but seriously, why do we allow businesses to operate under these circumstances? At my work, I would not be permitted to schedule a meeting with a client "sometime between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m." We should rise up against this practice! Rise up, I say!)

Around 4:30 p.m., we started getting pretty antsy, and I called TimeWarner to check on our tech's progress. But apparently the technology to keep track of techs' movements was decades off, because the agent told me she had no way of knowing how close or far away our tech was, but he would surely be there before 5 p.m., because that's the window we'd been provided, and it wasn't 5 p.m. yet, so what were we bothering her for? (I'm paraphrasing, but only slightly.)

At 5 p.m., the tech still had not arrived, so Chad called TimeWarner back, and this time he was told that yes, the tech would not be coming because he'd had a death in the family—which, let's face it, was almost certainly the same bullshit excuse given out any time a tech didn't make an appointment. Or maybe they had a list: Death in the family, medical emergency, street blocked off for gas leak, spider on your door buzzer, etc.

"When exactly did this person die?" said Chad.

"Excuse me?" said the agent.

"I'm asking when this tech's family member died, because half an hour ago you told us he was still on his way, so this family member was apparently alive and well at 4:30."

The agent stuck to her story, of course, and we were stuck waiting another few weeks for TimeWarner to send a non-grieving tech to our apartment.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/2/24

Hello, and welcome to the 249th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In college, I once found myself at a frat party, on the dance floor, (badly) dancing and also (inexplicably) making out with a woman I'd never met before. How either of us came to be in this situation is still a mystery to me, but I think the fact that we were both quite drunk might account for some of the gaps in the narrative. In the midst of making out with this woman, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned and saw a fraternity brother, who informed me that I was kissing his date.

In a response that can only be attributed to inebriation, I placed a hand on his shoulder and told him, "Not to worry, my good man. I have things well in hand."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/4/24

Hello, and welcome to the 250th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My dad loved to drive fast, but he hated getting pulled over by the police. You'd think that at some point, he'd have made a connection between those two things, and decided that he liked the first enough to tolerate the second, or that he disliked the second enough to knock off the first, but he never did. He was always belligerent when he was pulled over, exuding simmering rage and demanding to know why he'd been stopped (as if it weren't obvious). Sometimes, he'd roll his window down just a crack, enough to slide a license through and no more. Unsurprisingly, he always got a ticket. He got so many tickets just in the town of Troy, New Hampshire alone that he had my stepbrothers, Matthew and Nicholas, yell "Troy sucks!" out the car window every time they drove through.

Then someone gave him a book called "How to Talk Your Way Out of a Traffic Ticket," which is full of common-sense tips like "don't yell at the officer" and "don't try to outrun the officer," but they were definitely tips my dad needed. He studied the book as if it were holy scripture.

I was with him the first time he was pulled over after reading that book, which happened to be the day after his wedding to my stepmother. "Is there any chance you could give me a break today?" my dad asked humbly when the officer approached, a line right out of the book.

"Do you think you deserve a break?" said the officer.

"Well, I think so," said my dad. "You see, I'm on my honeymoon."

The officer peered in the window and eyed me, sitting in the passenger seat. "You're on your honeymoon?" he asked, skeptically. (Gay marriage wasn't yet legal, and even if it were, my dad was old enough to be my father.)

"Not with him," my dad hastened to clarify. "This is my son. But we'd both appreciate it a whole lot if you could give me a break."

And so the officer gave him a break, issuing a written warning, which was a first for my dad. He framed it.

My stepmother reports that he never got another ticket after that, but he did talk his way out of nine or ten, mostly by following the advice laid out in that book. The following story is my favorite:

My dad was on his way to a Red Sox game, speeding (of course) and arguing with a friend in the back seat who happened to be a fan of the hated Yankees. When a cop pulled my dad over, my dad blamed his infraction on being distracted by the asshole Yankees fan in the back seat, running his mouth about his team was going to beat my dad's beloved Red Sox. So, the cop gave my dad a warning, tapped on the back window, and muttered, "Go Sox!"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/9/24

Hello, and welcome to the 251st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

If you know me, you probably know that I'm something of an introvert. Parties and crowds can really unnerve me, sometimes to the point of incapacitation. One time, my girlfriend and I, introverts both, were on our way to a party being thrown and attended almost exclusively by comedians, which, if you're an introvert, is basically the nightmare scenario. Everybody is "on" all the time, sharing jokes and schtick, and nobody engages anybody with anything real. This is, perhaps, an unfair generalization, but I'll stand by it.

We were dreading this party. So, we decided we'd enter through the front door and just make our way to the back door, stopping to talk to anyone who stopped to talk to us, but definitely leaving the party when we reached the back door. So, that's what we did. It took us about 45 minutes. Every time someone stopped us to talk (or try out their latest material or whatever), we'd make a sincere effort to engage. As soon as the other person was ready to move on, so were we. Eventually, we got to the back door, exited, and went home.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/11/24

Hello, and welcome to the 252nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In college, a student I didn't know (for story purposes, let's call him Bill Hutchins) wrote a long, tantrumy column for the campus paper, complaining about a cafeteria worker who denied him entry to the cafeteria, allegedly because his "knees were too dirty" after playing rugby.

Now, I've seen plenty of people come off a muddy rugby field after a match, and believe me, more than just their knees would be dirty. I'm quite certain Bill Hutchins was covered head to toe in muck, but in his column, he kept insisting that he was forced to go without food because of his "dirty knees."

Charmingly, he concluded his with: "Fuck you, Middlebury College. I can't wait to graduate."

The letter annoyed me. It came across as smug and entitled and whiney—a rich, white boy not getting everything he wanted. I mean, for chrissakes, just go take a shower, you filthy degenerate!

So, I wrote a letter to the paper myself, defending that cafeteria worker and addressing Bill directly. I wrote (in part), "Maybe you should consider transferring to a school with a knees-blind admissions policy." (Ha! I crack myself up.)

I concluded the letter, "Fuck you, Bill Hutchins. We can't wait for you to graduate either."

Later that year, I applied for a summer job with cafeteria services, and my interviewer, upon seeing my name, personally thanked me for my letter.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

UPDATE: After writing this entry, I visited the Internet Archive to dig up the very documents described above. Below is a copy of the original column, followed by my reply, with Bill Hutchins' real name redacted in both. You'll see that thirty-five years later, I didn't get his closing words exactly right, but my letter is also a lot funnier than I remember. (I still crack myself up.)

click to enlarge

1/16/24

Hello, and welcome to the 253rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Whenever someone in my family gives a time as a straight-up integer (e.g. "We're meeting them at seven"), I'll ask if that's "o'clock" the way someone else may ask if that's "p.m."

So it would go a little something like this:

My wife: We're meeting them at seven.

Me: Seven o'clock?

My wife [assuming she doesn't ignore this entirely]: No, seven bells.

I'm delightful, aren't I?

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/18/24

Hello, and welcome to the 254th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This may be surprising, given the nature of this series, but I try to be mindful of my internet footprint. Given the fact that I'm the only Gregory Scott Tulonen in the world, any internet searches for my name are going to return results that are exclusively about me. (There is, however, a Gregory Scott Tolonen in Ortonville, Michigan, which freaks me out a little.) If I ever do something hugely shameful or embarrassing that's reported or recorded online, it will live on forever as my digital legacy.

I've already revealed the existence of my pseudonym, George Cotton Strunly.¹ I can now divulge that I sometimes leave comments on news and opinion websites using the name Kurt Bandersnatch.² If you ever come across a Kurt Bandersnatch giving some idiot hell in a comments section somewhere³, that's me. So, I guess the cat's out of the bag now.

Except, it was already out of the bag, as I shall now relay.

You see, there was once an online serialized comic strip I quite liked, but it was only sporadically updated, and the creator made frequent promises about posting new installments "in just a couple of days" or "next week" or "tomorrow," but nothing would ever be posted. Then one day in the early '10s, I left a very respectful comment as Kurt Bandersnatch, asking for more clarity and transparency regarding updates, even if that meant announcing that the comic would be going on an indefinite hiatus.

Well, this ENRAGED the creator, who somehow sussed out my secret identity and sent a very long, pissed-off message to my WORK email, cursing me out and berating me for my comment (which he had promptly deleted), and threatening to email my boss—as well as all my colleagues—to report that I'd been harassing him.

The creator in question last posted an update on his site in 2017 (and that was only after an unannounced two-year hiatus), writing: "Lots of good work in progress. Check back soon..." Since then, the comic has gone offline entirely, having never been completed.

And look, as an artist, I get it. Sometimes, projects—even projects we love—don't come to fruition. Life, and other priorities, get in the way. And that's fine.

Still, I should probably take the time to create yet another online alter ego.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹An anagram of Gregory Scott Tulonen—see GTS #2

²That's actually not the name I use, but I don't want a simple Google search to tie my real name and my fake name together, so for the purposes of relaying this secret, I have changed my fake name.

³Which you won't—see footnote 2.

1/23/24

Hello, and welcome to the 255th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was a kid, the summer camp my family ran served frozen orange juice in the morning. I don't like frozen orange juice—have never liked it. It's got a bitter undertaste that I find quite off-putting. On the other hand, I LOVE freshly squeezed orange juice—always have. It's like nectar.

As it happens, alongside the frozen orange juice, the camp sometimes offered fresh oranges at breakfast. So one morning, I painstakingly squeezed oranges into my juice glass by hand, so I would be able to enjoy some freshly squeezed OJ. This took quite a long time—almost the whole breakfast period—but when I finally had a full glass, my uncle David, who'd been sitting next to me the whole time, grabbed my glass from right in front of me and downed my juice in one gulp. Then he laughed hysterically.

Amy and Jillian: Did you know your father could be that mean?

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/25/24

Hello, and welcome to the 256th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Early one morning in 2013, we were awoken by an automated call from our credit union, alerting us that their fraud prevention department had detected suspicious activity on our account. The robot agent on the other end of the line asked a series of questions to verify whether or not we had recently made (roughly) four hundred dollars in iTunes purchases, which we had not. I indicated to the robot agent that we hadn't made any such purchases, and the robot agent advised me in a cold, mechanical voice that it was deactivating our debit cards, but we would need to work with our creditors to request that the charges be expunged. Then it abruptly ended the call.

I called the credit union to speak to a real live person, who, when she came on the line, told me that the (roughly) four hundred dollars in purchases arose out of twenty-five separate in-game transactions in a game called Tiny Zoo, which just so happened to be a favorite of our seven-year-old child.

"Flapjack!" Kate called, "Come here right now!" ("Flapjack" is not the kid's real name, of course, but as you know, I never use my kids' real names on here.)

Flapjack came in, unaware what was causing such a rumpus. "Did you make a bunch of in-game purchases on Tiny Zoo yesterday?" said Kate.

"Yes," answered Flapjack, truthfully.

"But every purchase requires a password!"

"I watched the password you put in when we bought the game," Flapjack explained, "and I just entered that."

"You spent four hundred dollars!"

"Oh."

The real live credit union employee was still on the line with me. I relayed this newly acquired information, and she told me that the credit union couldn't (or wouldn't) expunge the charges unless we pressed criminal charges against our child. That was out, obviously (well, maybe not OBVIOUSLY, but we ultimately decided that it was out). Since we had had that money set aside for food and shelter, we were pretty alarmed, so next we called Apple.

That's when we found out that because of a class-action lawsuit that had been filed over this exact issue being experienced by parents around the world, Apple allows a one-time get-out-jail-free card for iTunes purchases made by dumb-ass (and I use that adjective with love) kids. We took advantage of that opportunity, and Apple promptly refunded our money sixteen days later. (Funny how it took a couple of minutes to take the money out of our account, but a couple of weeks to put it back. No matter; I'm just grateful we got it back at all.)

Also, we changed our Apple account password, which we have not shared with Flapjack to this day (eleven years later).

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/30/24

Hello, and welcome to the 257th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was in fourth grade, I read Judy Blume's "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret," which didn't seem to me to be a strange thing to do, even though I was a boy. I'd read "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" and "Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great" and "Then Again, Maybe I Won't," and if I liked an author, I wanted to read everything by that author, regardless of whether or not I was in the so-called target demographic. In any case, I was carrying the book around with me for a week or so, pulling it out to read on the bus or outside of school before the morning bell, and it never once occurred to me to be circumspect about it, or even embarrassed. Then a couple of girls ran up to me in the schoolyard, laughing hysterically, asked me if I was going to get my period, and ran away, shrieking with more laughter. I looked after them, puzzled, and continued reading.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/1/24

ello, and welcome to the 258th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One day in the fall of 1991, I was standing on a street corner in Manhattan. I didn't have an apartment in Manhattan yet, or even a job, but I was trying (somewhat feebly) to acquire both. This was on First Avenue or Avenue A, I think, down on the lower East Side, and I was just kind of standing there, with nothing much on my mind and no particular place to go. I was feeling overwhelmed by the enormous tasks ahead of me, finding the aforementioned job and apartment in this big, scary city. A car came speeding along the avenue, and just as it passed me, someone rolled down the car window and shouted "Tulonen!" really loud.

The car did not stop. To this day, I don't know who that person was.

If you're reading this and it was you (or if you know who it was), it would be awesome if you could let me know, these many years later.

On the other hand, if you're reading this and it wasn't you (and you don't know who it was), you might be tempted, as a joke, to claim it was you, or to send me some other funny option, just for laughs. If you are so tempted, I urge you to pretend that you sent your joke and that everybody agreed it was hilarious, and then, when you're done pretending, not send it. I see you, and I fully acknowledge your hilariousness, but I'm only interested in truthful responses today.

Perhaps you believe that ignoring the above plea will make your joke even funnier. You're absolutely right! You truly are hilarious, and your keen comedy instincts cannot be denied. Still, I'm asking you this one time to please refrain. Just know that I know that you're very, very funny, and that your joke (which, again, I'm asking you NOT to post) is a real gem. Treasure it.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/6/24

Hello, and welcome to the 259th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Once, in college, Chad Anderson and I wanted to watch something on TV. This was before laptops and streaming, so if you wanted to watch TV, you had to secure a TV lounge (one per dorm). We wandered around from dorm to dorm, trying to find an open lounge, but the best we could come up with was a lounge occupied by a single guy, asleep on the floor in front of the TV, which was on. I can't explain why we didn't simply wake the guy up (you know, like a normal person), unless it was our inherent introvertedness, or our general fear of confrontation. In any case, we stood outside the lounge for far too long, agonizing over how to clear him out of there.

Finally, I said, "I have an idea." I opened the door to the TV lounge, leaned in, shouted, "Hey!" as loud as I possibly could, and then ran like hell, an astonished Chad following behind me. A few minutes later, we went back, and the TV lounge was now empty.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/8/24

Hello, and welcome to the 260th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

If you're from New England, and old enough to remember the Blizzard of '78, you know what a big deal it was. I was eight years old, and I'll never forget driving somewhere with my mother on the Friday before the storm hit, and the radio announcing that schools would be closed on the following Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. That's how big a storm it was.

We lived in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, on Longwood Avenue, which at least one person on the You Know You're from Fitchburg, MA When... Facebook group recently rated as one of the steepest streets in the city. Snowplows didn't touch Longwood all week, so of course it was completely impassable. Plows did maintain Pearl Street, which intersected with Longwood at the bottom, creating an enormous, ten-foot-tall pile of snow at the base of our street. These were ideal conditions for sledding, Longwood being free of traffic, and the giant snowbank at the bottom of the hill serving as a natural bulwark to stop any speeding sledders.

Except on one run, instead of being stopped by the ten-foot-tall snowbank, I (quite unintentionally, and extremely awkwardly) vaulted right over it just like Vinko Bogataj, the Slovenian ski jumper whose bungled jump was featured week after week in the "Wide World of Sports" intro to represent "the agony of defeat." (Nice guy, I hear. I think he's a painter now.)

With a sickening thud, I gracelessly landed right in the middle of the fully plowed Pearl Street, and if a car had been coming at that exact moment, I wouldn't be writing this today.

It took me a full two seconds to recover from the shock of what had just happened, and then, as quickly as I could, I scrambled up and over the snowback back to the relative safety of Longwood Avenue.

(I should mention that my mom—Joanne Tulonen—was at the top of Longwood, watching this with horror.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/13/24

Hello, and welcome to the 261st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I first started working for the news website MassLive.com, Jennifer Myszkowski, who sat in the cubicle next to mine, would often mention one of our colleagues named "Lucove," which seemed like an unusual name to me, but I figured he was probably European. I'd never met Lucove, but I was only working part time and I just assumed our paths hadn't yet crossed. I had met a guy named Lou, whose last name was Cove, and I knew perfectly well who he was, and then one day I realized that the Lucove in all of Jennifer's stories was actually Lou Cove.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/15/24

Hello, and welcome to the 262nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

The internet is rife with plagiarism and artistic thievery. You see so many stories about artists and artist-wannabees swiping other people's words/music/art with no acknowledgment or attribution. And with little to no regulation or oversight, it's just a free-for-all out there. (If you want to go down a very deep rabbit hole on this subject, look up "Hbomberguy" and "James Somerton.")

It happened to me once, believe it or not. I have a short story called "How Grandma Met the Rat Pack," published in 2005. Years later, I adapted it into a play, which has been staged at three different theaters. I also adapted it into a screenplay (you might say I've been plagiarizing from... myself!), which I entered into a film festival screenplay competition, and it was selected as one of the finalists.

I won't name the film festival judge in this post, but he is an acquaintance. He didn't do anything wrong, and I bear him absolutely no ill will. He taught a high school filmmaking class, where I know he emphasized proper crediting protocols. For the festival, he had his students prepare video presentations of the nominated screenplays—not full-fledged productions, but dramatic audio readings accompanied by appropriate graphics and sound effects.

The student who did the voices for "How Grandma Met the Rat Pack" was so pleased with his vocal efforts that he posted his audio of the entire screenplay on YouTube, before the festival, with no attribution or credit. I stumbled across it, and immediately reached out to the judge, who assured me that this had been an unauthorized posting, and that he would speak to the student about proper citations.

I also reached out to the student directly, praising his performance, and telling him it would be fine for him to keep the video up on YouTube, but he would need to credit me. He did not respond, nor did he take the video down or update its description.

So, I filed a copyright removal request with YouTube. I know YouTube's copyright removal process has been weaponized to the point of absurdity, and a lot of legitimate videos have been blocked under its heavy hand, but I had a legitimate claim. YouTube gave the kid a warning and a deadline, both of which were ignored. When the deadline passed, YouTube took the video down.

And thus my brush with plagiarism was resolved. I wish everybody who'd had their work appropriated could resolve the issue so easily.

Would that it were so simple.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/20/24

Hello, and welcome to the 263rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I love having just gotten my hair cut. I love the look of it, the feel of it, the way the hair on the back of my neck is all bristly—everything. I love everything about it. But I hate the process of actually getting my hair cut. Hate the whole thing. Hate sitting in one place under a smock, unable to get up or move, making awkward small talk, like:

"What do you do for a living?"

"I work for a non-profit in Lewiston.¹ What do you do?"

"Uh, I'm a hairdresser, you moron."²

"Oh, right."

In any case, that's probably why I put off getting my hair cut for months at a time, going only two or three times a year. Consequently, the above-mentioned small talk inevitably includes the line, "It's been a long time since your last cut, huh?" (which I hate).

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹See GTS #237.

²I might be paraphrasing..

2/22/24

Hello, and welcome to the 264th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once went on a picnic with my dad on a Japanese mountaintop. We didn't hike up the mountain, but rather motorcycled up the very narrow road that wound around the mountain's peak. I sat on the back of my dad's bike, 13 years old and wearing an enormous orange backpack holding all our picnic food and gear. I clung to my dad for dear life, my hands clasped tightly against his chest. We were on the inside lane, so there was a full lane between us and the cliff, but still, I kept my face buried against my father's warm, down-jacketed back, my eyes squeezed shut, so I wouldn't have to contemplate the sheer, railless drop-off we were riding along, and in that position I felt completely safe.

After our picnic, we walked around the mountaintop a bit, and on our walk, my dad wore the enormous orange backpack. When it was time to head back down the mountain, he forgot to transfer the backpack to me, so when I got on the back of the bike, I could no longer wrap my arms fully around him because the backpack was in the way. I could hold onto his sides, but that was about it, and obviously, I could not bury my face against his warm, down-jacketed back.

Now we were on the outside lane, mere inches away from a drop-off plunging thousands of feet down, which I now had no choice but to contemplate, and in that position, I felt completely terrified.

When we got to the bottom of the mountain, my dad noticed that he was still wearing the backpack, and said he'd wondered why I hadn't been holding onto him more tightly on the way down.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/27/24

Hello, and welcome to the 265th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I graduated from college in 1991 and grad school in 2002. This may seem geeky ["may"? - ed], but it pleases me that both of my graduation years were palindromes—the only palindromic years that will occur in my lifetime.

As many of you know, I have a thing for palindromes. Here are some that I created and illustrated, a long time ago:

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/29/24

Hello, and welcome to the 266th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once applied for a web producer position at a television station in Portland, Maine, which was the exact same job I'd been doing for Fox23 over the previous four years. A perfect fit! The human resources director who conducted my first interview seemed to love me. The sales manager who conducted my second interview seemed to love me. The general manager who conducted my third interview seemed to love me, going so far as to imply that the job was basically mine. And then: radio silence. I followed up a couple of times and was told to be patient; I would absolutely hear from them once a decision had been made.

Then one day, I was listening to "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me," the NPR news quiz. The first call-in contestant, when asked what he did for a living, revealed that he'd just started a new job as the web producer for that exact same television station in Portland.

Which is how I found out I hadn't gotten the job.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/5/24

Hello, and welcome to the 267th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Years ago, at another job, my boss got an email from the corporate office asking if she could attend a meeting scheduled for the following week. Instead of hitting "Reply" and writing "yes" (you know, like a normal person), she forwarded the email to me with the added instructions, "Please email back and confirm I will attend his meeting."

Now, I'm sure she was expecting me to write back in some formal capacity, as her assistant, informing the recipient that my boss would be attending the meeting.

What I did instead was to forward back to the original sender (cc'ing her) the email she'd just forwarded to me, including her instructions, adding: "See below."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/7/24

Hello, and welcome to the 268th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

A long time ago, I used to swim laps at the Y before work. That early in the morning, the lanes were occupied almost exclusively by old guys. (Old? Sure. Some of them must have been in their 50s!) If there were more swimmers than lanes, the etiquette was to stand at the end of a lane, wait for a swimmer to reach you, get their attention, and politely ask if you could share the lane, whereupon you would draw an imaginary line down the center of the lane and stick to one side or the other.

But the first time I tried this, I didn't know about the "stick to one side or the other" thing. I thought you were just supposed to stay to the right, no matter which direction you were headed, like American traffic. This resulted in a mid-pool collision with a very testy early morning swimmer.

The next time I tried it, I asked the guy if he would mind sharing a lane. He said he wouldn't mind, got out of the pool, and started swimming in another lane occupied by another swimmer, leaving his lane free and clear for me. This was NOT the collision guy, which would make sense, but rather another random stranger.

I realize now that my question had contained a linguistic ambiguity. When I asked him if he'd mind sharing a lane, I meant would he mind sharing a lane with ME, but he must have assumed I meant would he mind sharing a lane with somebody else—which would be kind of a dicky thing to ask, wouldn't it?

Still, I enjoyed having the lane to myself.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/12/24

Hello, and welcome to the 269th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

A police officer pulled me over one winter morning when I was on my way to work because he alleged I had not scraped my windshield completely enough, potentially impeding my visibility. He collected my license and registration, and went back to his cruiser.

I sat in my car, waiting for him to return, and worried I was going to be late for work. I sat and I waited and I worried for something like twenty minutes, which is an exceedingly long time for a supposedly routine traffic stop. My scheduled start time at work came and went, and this was before cell phones were a big thing, so there was nothing I could do but sit there. At one point I turned around to try to figure out just what the hell the officer was doing, and I saw that he was kneeling on the ground beside his cruiser, leaning down over the driver's seat.

"What the hell is this guy doing?" I said aloud. "Looking for his ass?" (That's literally what I said. Out loud. To myself. With nobody else in the car. That's how funny I am all the time. "Looking for his ass?" Man, I crack myself up!)

Finally, the officer returned, and he said, "Sorry about that. I want you to know, I was going to give you a ticket, but I dropped your driver's license down between the seat and the seat back, and it took me this long to fish it out again, so I'm going to let you go with a warning."

I'd been sitting in the car for so long, with the defroster on full blast, that my windshield was completely free of ice. "Is this clear enough for me to proceed?" I asked, entirely unnecessarily.

"Oh yeah," said the officer, oblivious to (or ignoring) my possible sarcasm. "You're good to go."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/14/24

Hello, and welcome to the 270th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Diane Normandin worked the laundry at the summer camp my family ran. When I was four or five years old, she gave me a Bobby Orr t-shirt that had somehow been separated from its owner's other laundry, and had gone unclaimed at the lost and found. Unaccountably, I loved this shirt, despite it being way too big for me (it dangled past my knees), and despite me having only the vaguest notion of who Bobby Orr even was. I was a staff kid, too young to be a camper myself, and I wore that shirt all over the camp.

(The shirt I'm wearing in this picture is not the actual shirt, obviously, but rather a best-I-can-do reproduction based on a half-century-old memory of what it looked like.)

Every time one particular camper saw me wearing the (original) shirt, he'd call out, "Hey! That's my Bobby Orr shirt!" He didn't seem angry, or determined to get it back, but rather kind of tickled that this little kid was running around wearing his shirt. Or at least, that's how it seemed to me. We must have crossed paths while I was wearing the shirt a half dozen times over the summer, and each time, he grinned and pointed at me and told me I was wearing his shirt.

Not once did it occur to me to offer it back.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/19/24

Hello, and welcome to the 271st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the summer of '82, my dad and I went to Disney World. EPCOT was still a few months away from opening, but my dad decided we should look around to see what it was like, so we just drove past all the "DO NOT ENTER" and "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" and "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY" signs, and my dad kept saying, "Act like we belong here." We passed construction workers and foremen, executives in suits and hard hats, employees clutching clipboards, but nobody stopped us. We got an occasional curious glance, but we just nodded purposefully at everybody, and nobody flagged us down to find out just who the hell we were. We drove all around the soon-to-be fully operational park, looking at all the stuff that was almost ready to open, and then we drove back to the hotel.

Truth be told, what we were able to see wasn't all that interesting, but the trespassing itself sure was.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/21/24

Hello, and welcome to the 272nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Twice in my life, at two different locations (in fact, in two different states), I came home to find a police car parked across the edge of my driveway, parallel to the street, completely blocking my access.

The first time it happened, we lived in Florence, Massachusetts. When I got home, I parked illegally (no choice), went inside, and called the local police station to find out just what was up with the police car blocking my driveway. The dispatcher told me the police were dealing with a situation at our neighbor's house, but she would radio them and tell them they were in my way, and they'd move their car immediately. (By the way, our neighbors had their very own driveway, so my thought was: Why the heck aren't they parked in the NEIGHBORS' driveway?) I waited about twenty minutes, and finally the police came out of my neighbor's house and drove away.

A few days later, I asked my neighbor if everything was okay, you know, because of the police car that had been blocking my driveway due to a "situation" at her house. She just shook her head, laughed a little, and said, "The Patriot Act. Need I say more?" And I thought, I mean, you COULD say more if you wanted to, but honestly, I don't have any more information than before I asked the question, so it's up to you. I didn't say any of that though. I just laughed to match her little laugh, shook my head to match her little head-shake, and went about my business.

The second time it happened, we lived in Auburn, Maine. Unlike the first time, which had been during the day, this was at night, and it was very, very dark. I tried to see if there was an officer in the car by going up close to the window and peering in, my hands cupped on either side of my eyes. And that's when the heretofore unseen police dog inside the car jumped up and started barking at me, millimeters from my face, separated only by a single pane of glass, its claws frantically scratching the window. I leapt back, shouting "Jesus Fucking Christ!" and very nearly peed my pants.

Once again, I called the local police. The dispatcher assured me that the officer assigned to that particular squad car was currently patrolling an entirely different neighborhood from mine. "Well, that may be so," I told her, but his car is blocking my driveway." So, she promised to radio him and have him move the car immediately. Once again, I waited about twenty minutes, which I've come to understand is the police department equivalent of "immediately." This time, the officer came to our door to apologize, and to explain that he hadn't realized he'd been parking across the end of somebody's driveway, which is just the kind of keen observational abilities you want in your local law enforcement.

So, yeah. The same thing has happened to me twice. To quote Dr. Doofenshmirtz from the great animated TV show, "Phineas and Ferb" (in another context): "Wow! If I had a nickel for every time [that happened], I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right?"

And to quote comedian Nate Bargatze (also in another context): "It's happened to me two times. Twice. And let me tell you, one time is a lot of times. The second time, you start looking at yourself. You start thinking, 'What am I doing?'"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/26/24

Hello, and welcome to the 273rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When "Batman the Animated Series" was first airing, I wrote a spec script for the show called "Citizen Wayne," a pastiche of "Citizen Kane" in which a reporter tries to piece together the life of Bruce Waye (who has supposedly been killed) via point-of-view accounts from various people in Wayne's life. All the while, Robin lurks in the background, investigating Batman's disappearance. In the end, neither Wayne nor Batman is dead, of course, and the would-be killer is captured. I sent my script off unsolicited to the good people at Warner Bros., and they sent me back a nice rejection letter, advising me that all of the show's scripts had already been assigned, but enclosing a sample script and storyboard for the classic BTAS episode, "Heart of Ice."

I should mention that this was all done old-school, through the mail, and that in order to protect myself from potential plagiarism, I mailed myself a copy of the script, so I'd have a sealed, postmarked envelope with my original script inside. This was probably unnecessary, and I have no idea if such a move would hold up in a court of law. (Probably not.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

3/28/24

Hello, and welcome to the 274th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I was traveling somewhere with my older child when he was two years old. The thing about traveling with a two-year-old by yourself is that you have to take the two-year-old with you everywhere you go. You can't leave him in the car or leave him on a bench or leave him with a stranger, so if you have to go into a rest stop bathroom stall, the two-year-old is coming into that stall with you.

There we were, my son and I, together in the restroom stall. We took care of his business first, and then it was my turn, so I started to undo my pants.

It was fairly crowded outside the stall, the buzz of chattering travelers coincidentally coming to a natural lull just as my son loudly exclaimed, "Wow! You have a really big penis!"

(Believe me, this is not some sort of stealth humble-brag. A two-year-old's perspective on such matters should not be taken as authoritative.)

The silence in the restroom deepened, intensifying into something like the silence that must exist in the vast nothingness of space. "He's my son!" I felt like shouting, but suspected that would just make things worse. Somebody coughed, breaking the spell, and the murmuring buzz of conversation resumed.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/2/24

Hello, and welcome to the 275th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This is how dumb I am: A long time ago, a woman I had a crush on (but with whom I was not involved; in fact, she had a boyfriend) told me that she'd had a dream that we'd had sex, and I STILL didn't understand that she was maybe interested in me too. I was all like, "Wow, that's crazy!"

Anyway, that's how dumb I am (or at least, how dumb I was in my 20s).

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/4/24

Hello, and welcome to the 276th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My favorite teacher of all time was my fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Gaumond. Every day for an hour after lunch, Mr. Gaumond would read to us from a young adult novel, working his way through each chapter, day by day, until we reached the end. If we came to a suspenseful bit right at the end of the hour, that was just too bad. We'd have to wait until the next day to find out what happened.

Mr. Gaumond was a marvelous reader, coming up with distinct voices for all the characters. His accent for "Timothy," a West Indian native in the Theodore Taylor novel "The Cay," was particularly memorable (though I can't speak to its authenticity).

We read our fair share of tearjerkers, including the aforementioned "The Cay," as well as"The Pigman" by Paul Zindel and "Where the Red Fern Grows" by Wilson Rawls. That last one was particularly brutal, climaxing as it does with the deaths of the narrator's two beloved Redbone Coonhound dogs. As my kids once observed when they were much younger:

Older Child: "You have to be careful with books about dogs."
Younger Child: "Yeah. They either get lost or they die."
Older Child: "Or they get lost and then they die."

[citation: Actual Conversations With My Kids #91, which also documents the older child's reaction to "Charlotte's Web," the mother of all children's tearjerkers.]

Anyway, one winter in Mr. Gaumond's class, we were making our way through yet another tearjerker, "Bridge to Terabithia" by Katherine Paterson. The Friday before February break, the reading hour ended with these devastating words, which I've never forgotten:

"Your girlfriend's dead, and Momma thought you was dead, too."

As the class sat there, collectively dumbfounded, Mr. Gaumond placed a bookmark in the novel and stowed the book on the shelf. We begged him to read the next chapter, but he said no. Just the first few paragraphs? No. The first sentence? No! I asked him to at least reveal the title of the next chapter, and that request he granted (though ironically enough, it turned out to be "No!")

Waiting through the entire February break to find out what had happened was unacceptable. As I walked home from school, I took a detour to the city library. I didn't have my library card with me, but I went to the children's section and read the rest of the novel right there in one sitting.

After that, I walked the rest of the way home, marinating in sadness and regret, thinking to myself, "Maybe I should have waited."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/9/24

Hello, and welcome to the 277th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was in college, I once remarked that it would be great if, when you met someone you were interested in, you could look them up in some sort of database that would tell you that person's current relationship status. In other words, Mark Zuckerberg probably owes me some money, because it was I (and not the Winklevoss twins) who actually invented Facebook.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/11/24

Hello, and welcome to the 278th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Chad Anderson, Kate Culkin, and I were hanging out in one of our college dorm lounges. I can't remember why we were there instead of one of our own rooms. We weren't watching anything or playing a game. I think each of us was reading a separate book, on separate couches. But we were doing it together.

Three other students walked into the lounge. "Oh," one of them said, clearly disappointed by our presence. (I can't tell you exactly how many times someone has been disappointed by my presence, but let's just say... it's probably more than "several.")

"We were going to play some D&D in here," our new arrival informed us. (For the uninitiated, "D&D" stands for "Dungeons and Dragons," the fantasy tabletop role-playing game.)

"That's fine," we assured him. "You won't bother us."

We could have just left, I suppose, but I don't think any of us felt like moving, and besides, I was kind of curious what a real-life D&D game would be like, with all those monsters and dragons and wizards and mages and potions and battles, all up close and personal. It would be like I had a front-row seat to a live-action "Lord of the Rings."

The players took seats side-by-side with each of us, on the three separate couches we were occupying. The game's host, or "Dungeon Master" (DM), began recounting to the other players the scenario they were in. "You're in a hallway of a house," he said. "You can go north or south."

"Let's go north," said Player 1.

[pause to consult notes] "You're in a kitchen," said the DM.

"I want to search the kitchen," said Player 2.

[pause to consult notes] "A search of the kitchen reveals the expected kitchen accouterments. Knives, forks, spoons and other assorted cooking utensils. A sink, a refrigerator, a stove. A microwave, a coffee maker, a toaster. It's relatively clean and tidy."

"Can we look in the cabinets?" said Player 1.

"Sure."

"Let's look in the cabinets then."

[pause to consult notes] "You open the cabinets and see various dry goods and kitchen staples."

"Is there any coffee?" said Player 2.

[pause to consult notes] "Yes."

"Can we make some coffee in the coffee maker?"

"You can try."

"All right. I'd like to make some coffee in the coffee maker. Is there any milk or cream?"

"You'd need to look in the refrigerator," said the DM.

"Okay, now I want to look in the refrigerator."

[pause to consult notes] "The refrigerator has milk in it, as well as various cold cuts, cheeses, and leftovers."

"I want to take the milk out and make some coffee with a little milk."

I'll pause here to note that this whole thing was exponentially far from the fantastic scenarios I had imagined being played out in a game of D&D. I mean, maybe things were about to pick up, fantasy-wise (maybe the coffee would turn out to be MAGIC coffee), but so far, everything seemed ordinary and mundane and, well, kind of boring. I glanced at Chad and Kate, and could tell at once they were thinking exactly the same thing, and that's when the three of us burst into uncontrollable laughter.

The players looked at us, puzzled and a little hurt. "Well, now I feel like a loser," said the DM, somewhat forlornly.

"No, no, no!" we assured him. It wasn't them. It was us. We gathered our things and left, still giggling. The players watched us leave, their eyes narrowed, and then (presumably) returned to pretending to make coffee.

Look, I know who the villains of this story are, and they're NOT the D&D players. Sure, they didn't have to make camp in the space we were occupying, but we told them it was fine, and besides, nobody deserves to be laughed at for doing something they enjoy. All I can say is: There was no malice intended; we honestly just couldn't help ourselves.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/16/24

Hello, and welcome to the 279th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

A while back, a coworker, returning from her daughter's wedding, showed me a picture of her daughter in her bridal gown.

"Beautiful!" I said. "Is she single?"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/18/24

Hello, and welcome to the 280th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

If you're familiar with the DC Comics superhero Green Lantern, you may know about the ancient oath that every member of the Green Lantern Corps must recite before charging up their emerald power rings, the most powerful weapons in the universe:

In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight!
Let those who worship evil's might
Beware my power ― Green Lantern's light!

But if you're a true Green Lantern enthusiast, you probably also know that the Green Lantern Corps sometimes does battle with the Red Lantern Corps, a supervillain group that draws its power from the emotional spectrum of rage. The Red Lantern Corps has an oath of its own:

With blood and rage of crimson red,
Ripped from a corpse so freshly dead!
Together with our hellish hate,
We'll burn you all ― that is your fate!

Grisly stuff, no?

All of this is backstory to the fact that my older kid, about a year after receiving an iPhone when he was ten, decided to set his iPhone unlock passcode to the entire text of the Red Lantern Oath. (I know! That's potentially alarming, call-the-child-psychologist-type stuff. But trust me, the kid was ― and is ― sweet as pie.)

The only problem was that when he was setting up the passcode, which had to be typed in twice to confirm, he somehow made the same (unknown) typo both times, resulting in a fully loaded passcode that was potentially only one character off from the Red Lantern Oath above—impossible to recreate, and thus rendering his phone completely inaccessible.

He came to me in tears to reveal the mishap. After gently admonishing him for creating such a long and convoluted (not to mention disturbing) passcode, I called Apple support to explain the situation—though I was too embarrassed to disclose that he'd used the Red Lantern Oath, so I told them it was the Green Lantern Oath instead (unnecessary and irrelevant to disclose even that, since, as I understand it, individual passwords are not visible to Apple support; they're a closed loop between users and their phones). In any case, I spent the next three hours on the phone with Apple Support, resetting and then restoring my child's phone.

The things we do for our kids.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/23/24

Hello, and welcome to the 281st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When we were living in Massachusetts, Kate accepted a job in Maine, which meant that I needed to find a job in Maine too. I sent so many applications to job listings from all over the state, and I heard exactly bupkis in reply. Maine doesn't care that you're "planning" to move there, or even if you were born there. If you're applying from Massachusetts, you're applying "from away."

Out of desperation, I hired a resume consultant, who rewrote my resume top to bottom, adding more muscular verbs like "fielded," "ushered," "oversaw," and "coordinated," and putting the whole thing in a "more assertive font"—Times New Roman, for the font-curious among my readers. (It had previously been Garamond.)

She also advised me that the next time I sent out a resume in response to a job posting, I should wait ten days, and then call the company to schedule my interview, regardless of whether or not I'd heard back from them.

"Uh, I don't think that's how it works," I said.

"Trust me," she said. "I've helped hundreds of people through the job search process. This is how it's done now. You need to stand out. You need to show you're assertive. You need to show you can take the initiative. You need to call and schedule your interview before they even realize they should be calling you."

So, that's what I did. I called the company I'd just sent a resume to and told the receptionist I wanted to schedule an interview.

"Who do you want to schedule an interview with?" she replied.

"Well, the person who'll be conducting the web producer interviews, I suppose."

"Did they call you?"

"No, I'm calling them."

"I don't think that's how it works."

"Right, but I was just wondering if I could briefly speak to that person anyway."

[long pause] "Hold on. I'll transfer you to [our human resources person]."

[long pause]

Human resources person: "Hello?"

"Yes, my name is Greg Tulonen. I'm calling to schedule an interview for the web producer position."

"You're what?"

"I'm calling to schedule an interview for the web producer position."

"We're not even interviewing for that position yet. We're still taking applications."

"I see. And when will you be interviewing?"

"We'll be calling to arrange interviews. If you hear from us, that's when we're interviewing. I don't understand why you called me."

"Neither do I, honestly. Thanks for the information."

Now, as it happens, several months later, I did interview for that job (twice) and was eventually hired, but I am 100% certain that this WASN'T because I'd presumptively and prematurely called and tried to schedule my own interview.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

4/25/24

Hello, and welcome to the 282nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I got a new job some years ago, and on my first day, I was told that for office supplies, I should see a man named Jared (not his real name, but it did start with "J"). I found Jared, introduced myself, and asked him for some basic materials: pens, stapler, tape dispenser, notepads, etc.

Jared stood up, removed a key from a lanyard around his neck, and opened the supply cabinet behind him—just a crack, so I couldn't see in. He reached in and emerged with a single pen, which he held out for me to take.

I looked at the pen, and then back at Jared. "Uh, can I have more than one?" I asked.

"Why?" said Jared. "You planning on writing with two hands at once?"

[Aside: That one comment, along with the single pen offer, told me everything I needed to know about Jared, a squirrelly oddball-type with subpar social skills.¹ Jared, I would come to learn, loved to insert himself into other people's conversations, and if he didn't know anything about the subject of that conversation, he'd change the subject. Torrey Ham and I were talking about the latest episode of "Lost," and Jared chimed in from his desk about how he once got lost on his way to a party. "We were talking about the show 'Lost,'" I explained. "I know," he replied. "I don't watch that show." End aside.]

Jared was still proffering the solitary pen. I coughed lightly and said, "It's just... I, you know, sometimes lose pens."

"Then you should keep better track of them."

"Maybe so, but just so I don't have to bug you in three days after I've lost this one, could I maybe get a handful?"

Very reluctantly, Jared retrieved two more pens, and handed them to me, along with the first one. Then he firmly shut the cabinet door.

"I still need a stapler and tape dispenser and notepads," I reminded him.

His eyes narrowed, but once again he opened the cabinet, just a crack, to retrieve the other items. (I was afraid to ask how many individual staples he was willing to part with.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹This is the same guy described in GTS #158, whose full initials were JEW, and who wrote "JEW" on all the food he kept in the office fridge.

4/30/24

Hello, and welcome to the 283rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Sometimes, when Kate is talking to me, she'll walk out of the room, still talking. This isn't done in anger; she just wanders away, but still carrying on our conversation until I can't hear what she's saying anymore. Even now, twenty-five years in, it's unclear to me if I'm supposed to get up and follow her, or if I should stay where I am until she loops back.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/2/24

Hello, and welcome to the 284th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Every night, when I was a small child, my mom (Joanne Tulonen) would read one book to me before bed. I got to choose the book, and every night, I chose "Uncle Wiggily and the Peppermint" (pictured here). It was my favorite book, mostly because it was by far my longest book, and thus any recitation of it would extend my bedtime by the longest possible margin.

"Not 'Uncle Wiggily and the Peppermint' again!" my mom would exclaim in mock(?) despair, but I was steadfast in my toddler resolve, and I would settle in for the story of how Uncle Wiggily is saved from a mean black bear when the bear gulps down the entire bottle of peppermint juice Uncle Wiggily has fetched from the pharmacy for Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, the muskrat lady housekeeper, who's been suffering from a spot of indigestion.

I knew the story so well, if my mom tried to skip over a page, paragraph, sentence, or even a single word, I would stop her and make her go back.

Before our kids were even born, Kate bought them a copy of "Uncle Wiggily and the Peppermint," advising them in an inscription that they should seek out Grammy Jo to read it to them.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/7/24

Hello, and welcome to the 285th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When our first child was born, Kate and I took turns staying up with the very fussy baby, who we would soon learn was developing pyloric stenosis.¹ Early one morning, after a long string of sleepless nights, I was holding the baby on the living room sofa, and Kate shuffled in, looking exhausted and somewhat stricken. "There's a dead mouse on the kitchen floor," she informed me.

My sleep-deprived brain attempted to process this information. "Do you think one of the cats killed it?" I asked her.

She gave me a puzzled look. "What's the alternative?"

"I don't know," I said. "Does it look like it died of natural causes?"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹See GTS #197.

5/9/24

Hello, and welcome to the 286th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was eight years old, my bedtime was 9 p.m, which came about after a 14-month campaign on my part to raise it from 8 p.m.—said campaign consisting of notes left in my mom's lunch, signs and placards left around the house, and constant, tenacious wheedling in person. Once established, that 9 p.m. bedtime was hard and fast and no longer negotiable, my mom decided. Any pleas for a bedtime later than 9 p.m. would fall upon unsympathetic ears.

However, on December 6, 1977, there was no school the next day due to an impending snowstorm, so I was allowed to stay up until 9:30 p.m. to watch M*A*S*H, a show I loved and watched every day in syndication. As it happens, the episode of M*A*S*H that aired on December 6, 1977 was "Comrades in Arms," which ends with Hawkeye and Margaret locked in a passionate embrace while under enemy fire, and (much to my shock) a "To Be Continued" message on the screen.

I assumed my mom wouldn't be hard-hearted enough to deny me a one-time 30-minute extension to my 9 p.m. bedtime the following week, just so I could see how Part 2 played out, but she informed me immediately and firmly that no such extension would be granted.

I was shocked, and I immediately began a weeklong crusade to get her to change her mind. This crusade was unsuccessful, and on December 13, 1977, I was made to go to bed at my regular 9 p.m. bedtime, so I did not get to see what happened in "Comrades in Arms, Part 2." (Obviously, this was before VCRs, TiVos, or streaming. If you missed something, you missed it, and that was just too bad.)

The fact that I still to this day occasionally bring this incident up to my mother might serve as an indication of how deeply it affected me.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/14/24

Hello, and welcome to the 287th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once clogged a toilet at work. There was no plunger available, so there was really nothing I could do about it on my own. Nobody had seen me go into or come out of the bathroom, so I could have just left it there for somebody else to discover and deal with, but wanting to be a responsible citizen in a civilized society, I tracked down the janitor and informed him of the issue.

He glared at me. "Did you use too much toilet paper?" he said, which seemed like it might be a trick question.

"No," I said, because I had used exactly as much toilet paper as was required—neither more nor less.

"Well, it was either too much toilet paper or too much shit," he snarled. (So it HAD been a trick question.) "You tell me which."

I had nothing to say to that, and I stood there silently in front of him, my face burning, wondering why I had thought it was so important to be a good citizen in the first place.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/16/24

Hello, and welcome to the 288th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I have a touch of face-blindness, a real condition also known as prosopagnosia. Sometimes, when I'm watching a movie starring an actor I've never seen before, his character might do something unexpected three-quarters of the way through, and I'll be like, "Wait, was that the main guy or somebody else?" And sometimes, I'll mix up casual acquaintances who have similar features and hair styles, and do my best not to let on that I'm confused.

I'm much better at recognizing facial EXPRESSIONS than facial features. I'll be watching something, see some obscure actor, and I'll be like, "Oh wait, I saw that guy make that same expression on an episode of "NYPD Blue" thirty years ago. And I'll be correct. Weird, right?

If I know someone well, this isn't a problem. I have no trouble recognizing family members, dear friends, and close colleagues. But if I know someone only casually, or have seldom actually spoken to that person one-on-one, it can be a big problem. Once, I was in a grocery store, and I encountered a woman who expressed surprise and delight at seeing me, and I had no idea who she was.

I figured I could just bluff my way through, so I expressed my own (feigned) surprise and delight at seeing her.

"How are you doing?" I said.

"Great, great. Are you still at the same job?" (So, that ruled out current colleagues.)

"I sure am," I said. "Ten years now."

"Wow! That's amazing!"

"I know, right? How about you? Are you still..." (I spoke slowly, gesturing towards her, hoping she'd fill in the blanks.)

"I just quit," she said.

"Wow!" I exclaimed. "Are you going to another job or had you just had enough?" (This seemed like a safe, innocuous inquiry, and maybe I'd be able to gather more intel from her answer.)

"I'm moving out of state," she said.

"Oh!" I said. "For a job or..."

"For a man," she said, sheepishly. "I'm a little embarrassed."

"Oh, there's nothing to be embarrassed about," I assured her. (I still had no idea who this was.) "You've gotta do what makes you happy."

"That's right!" she said, smiling.

Soon after that, her demeanor changed slightly, and she grew cooler. "Well, it was nice seeing you," she said, a little abruptly.

"You too," I said, and we continued our separate ways.

Afterwards, I pondered her sudden coolness. Had I imagined it? Or had she caught on to the fact that I was bluffing? Maybe something I'd said or done had given the game away.

But then another possibility occurred to me:

Maybe she realized midway through our conversation that she'd mistaken ME for someone else, that she actually had no idea who I was, and we were just two strangers, faking our way through a friendly conversation. I find this idea hilarious.

I'd like to think that was it, but in case it wasn't, in case it was someone I DO know, and in case that person is reading this right now:

I truly am sorry. In the right context, I'm sure I'd know who you are, even if I had trouble recognizing you in the grocery store.

It's not you. It's the prosopagnosia!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/21/24

Hello, and welcome to the 289th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I saw "The Sixth Sense" with Chad Anderson on opening day, long before all that hype about the twist ending had built up any steam. Say what you will about M. Night Shyamalan's subsequent films, but "The Sixth Sense" is an exquisitely crafted magic trick, its secret hidden in plain sight.

Except, partway through the movie, I saw the trick for what it was and I realized...

[I'm about to spoil the ending of "The Sixth Sense," but to quote comedian Nate Bargatze, "If you don't know by now, I don't know what to tell you."]

...I realized that Bruce Willis had not been spoken to or acknowledged by anybody except the little boy since the opening scene, and that his character was probably dead.

[Nate Bargatze again: "If you haven't seen it, that's a pretty big part of it."]

I wanted Chad to have an unspoiled experience, but I also wanted credit for this deduction, and as it turns out, I wanted the credit just a little bit more. So, I leaned over and whispered to him, "Do you think Bruce Willis is dead?"

"Goddamnit!" whispered Chad, the spell broken. "I do now!"

(In case it isn't clear, I am the villain of this story.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

UPDATE: Here's the Nate Bargatze "Sixth Sense" routine referenced above:

5/23/24

Hello, and welcome to the 290th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Early one summer morning when I was 16, a colleague of my dad's called him up first thing in the morning with a babysitting emergency. His wife was out of town, his babysitter had canceled last minute, and he desperately needed someone to look after his three-year-old and five-year-old boys for the day while he went to a Red Sox game. My dad volunteered my services, woke me up, and drove me over to his colleague's house.

My dad's colleague did not give me much instruction on the care and feeding of his children, so I was left to wing it for the next eight hours. I was sixteen years old and fairly unequipped to care for two toddlers on my own for one hour, let alone eight. I had no idea what they liked to do or liked to eat or liked to watch—this was before DVDs, and there were no children's VHS tapes on hand (it was the mid-'80s).

I followed the kids' lead for the most part, though I think they may have tried to hoodwink me on how many cookies they were allowed to have in one sitting. Neither kid was still in diapers, but the younger boy was not fully potty-trained, I discovered multiple times (to my chagrin).

The two of them were indefatigable, demanding constant attention and care, which is completely normal for a three-year-old and a five-year-old, I learned much later in life. What got me through the day was knowing I'd be getting paid. We hadn't negotiated an hourly rate, but I assumed my payday would be substantial for a full eight-hour day with multiple meals and potty accident clean-ups.

When my dad's colleague returned, he thanked me for my help, dug into his pocket, and fished out four one dollar bills, handing them over to me with no shame or embarrassment whatsoever. (It may have been the mid-'80s, but 50 cents an hour was NOT the going rate for babysitting.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/28/24

Hello, and welcome to the 291st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was a kid, and people were toasting marshmallows around a campfire, I was told that I would need to find a "green stick" if I wanted to toast my own marshmallow. I can't tell you how many times my mother (Joanne Tulonen) told me I needed a "green stick."

Well, a "green stick," I now know, is simply a stick snapped from a living tree, rather than some dead branch found on the ground. But nobody ever explained that to me, so I spent so much time searching for a stick that was the color green—difficult when you're searching at night, which is when campfires are typically built.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

5/30/24

Hello, and welcome to the 292nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I was on the highway, in the left lane, passing a long row of cars in the right. The speed limit was 65, and I was going about 74. I noticed a guy tailgating me—extremely close, closer than anybody had ever tailgated me before. Maybe two quarters could have fit between our bumpers, but certainly not three, and his windshield filled up my rearview, its edges stretching beyond the confines of the mirror. (He wasn't visible in my sideview mirrors at all.) He was so close, I could clearly see his face, contorted with rage, as he jabbed his left index finger towards the right-hand lane, presumably demanding that I pull over to the right lane to let him pass.

Now, like all good citizens, I hate it when there's a slowpoke in the passing lane, but I wasn't exactly a slowpoke here. I was going nine miles per hour over the speed limit, and there was a dense cluster of cars to my right, all going slower than I was. Also, I hate tailgaters. Tailgating me will never get me to speed up. Never.

A car up ahead of me in the right lane pulled into the left, directly in front of me, going decidedly slower than 74. I tapped my brakes, which seemed to enrage the driver behind me even more. He eased off my rear bumper, far enough back that I finally had a good view of the flashing lights atop his car, which had evidently been flashing the entire time he'd been doing his angry finger-pointing routine. Then he turned on his siren.

So, yeah, my angry tailgater had been a cop the whole time, as it turns out.

I made my way over to the right-hand breakdown lane. The cop pulled to a stop behind me and came running up to my window. I was expecting him to be pretty mad, but this guy was incandescent. "Do you not know what those lights mean?" he shouted.

I figured I was done for anyway, so there was absolutely no point in groveling. "I know what those lights mean," I told him, "but I couldn't see them because you were following behind me so close. If you'd used your siren right away, I would have pulled over immediately."

"And what about your little brake test? Trying to get me to rear-end you?"

"No, sir. A car pulled in front of me and I had to step on my brake."

"There wasn't any car!"

"There absolutely was. I don't want to get rear-ended."

"Let me see your license and registration!"

I offered him my license and registration. He snatched them from my hand and returned to his cruiser, still seething.

You know that moment, when the cop has collected your documents, and you're just sitting there in your car, worrying about what your fate is going to be? Are you going to get a ticket? Are you going to get a warning? What's going to happen? Most of us have been there, right?¹ Well, this time, I felt no such anxiety, because I knew for certain I'd be getting a ticket. This cop was too angry to let me off with anything but a hefty fine.

A few minutes later, the cop returned, tossed my license and registration into my lap, and muttered, "Next time, pull over." Then, to my astonishment, he stomped back to his cruiser and drove away.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹See GTS #34, and also GTS #269.

6/4/24

Hello, and welcome to the 293rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Many years ago, around the time Kate and I were first dating, we found ourselves at a party, where, as sometimes happened at parties back then, a game of Trivial Pursuit came about, seemingly without any prompting from anybody.

Kate and I were teamed with a stranger (I never saw him before, and I've never seen him since), and for every single question we got (and I mean EVERY. SINGLE. QUESTION.), he insisted that the question be repeated multiple times (two times, three times, even four times), confidently assuring us each time that, "Sometimes, the answer is in the question."

Okay, sometimes, every once in a while, that's true (e.g. "What were the surnames of the three men hanged at Greenberry Hill, London?"). But far more often, the question is completely straightforward, like: "Name three European countries that begin with the letter A." There's really nothing to be gleaned from further recitation. Still, this guy insisted that every single question, even the most straightforward, be repeated multiple times, listening intently each time as if an answer could be divined from the question alone, muttering over and over again, "Sometimes the answer is in the question." Even when Kate or I knew the answer immediately and with absolute certainty, he'd still demand that the question be repeated. "Sometimes, the answer is in the question."

To this day, upon encountering some imponderable inquiry (like: "Where did I put my glasses?"), Kate or I will say to the other, "Sometimes, the answer is in the question," which still cracks us both up. (Meanwhile, I'm quite certain that this guy, whoever he was, hasn't given us a thought in over twenty years.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/6/24

Hello, and welcome to the 294th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This Tuesday, at 7:05 a.m., immediately after the recycling truck had come and gone, I went down to the curb to retrieve our recycling bin, but it was gone. The recycling crew had evidently taken the bin right along with the empty cat litter jugs that had been inside it.

I called our public works department, and the guy on the phone at the public works department was unsympathetic to my plight. "You'll have to call Casella," he told me. "That's the company we contract with to do our recycling pickups."

So, I called Casella, and the woman on the phone at Casella was very sympathetic to my plight, but advised that Casella could not replace our recycling bin, because our recycling bin had been issued by the town. I would need to speak to our public works department.

So, I called our public works department back. This time, they advised me that the town no longer offers recycling bins, and the recycling bin we'd been using had been issued before the practice had been discontinued. And besides, ANY bin can work as a recycling bin.

"Not if the recycling people keep taking it," I said, extremely frustrated now, and that would have been the end of the story, except that later that same day, I discovered that the Casella crew HADN'T taken our recycling bin, but rather stowed it underneath our neighbor's upside-down trash barrel, where I hadn't thought to look for it.

So, that was my journey on Tuesday.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/11/24

Hello, and welcome to the 295th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I remember once when I was very little, getting into a stubborn fight with my mom (Joanne Tulonen).

"I'm losing my temper," she warned.

"Good," I said. "I hope you never find it again."

(So yes, I've always been this much of a smartass.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/13/24

Hello, and welcome to the 296th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Not long ago, I went through the McDonald's drive-through with my kids. As I approached the speaker, a cheerful voice emerged: "Hi! Did you order through the McDonald's app today?"

"No," I answered, because up until that moment I'd been blissfully unaware of the McDonald's app's existence, but my "No" was drowned out by the voice, which had kept talking, plowing right over my words, extolling the virtues of the McDonald's app, droning on and on and on. That's when I realized that this was not a live person, but rather a recording. An advertisement. A robot.

"I can't believe it," I said, infuriated. "I'm talking to a robot! And not only that, but the robot asked me a question and didn't bother to wait for my answer! What's the point of that? Why are they making me talk to a rude, interrupting robot before I can place my damned order?" and so on, along those lines, more for my own amusement than my kids'. Meanwhile, the robot kept right on pitching the McDonald's app for a good long while before a real-live human came on to take our order.

When I arrived at the pickup window, the woman in the window was laughing hard. "We could hear you that whole time," she said.

"Good," I replied, unsmiling.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/18/24

Hello, and welcome to the 297th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When my mom (Joanne Tulonen) and I lived in Wilsall, Montana in the '80s, there was no cable TV, and we were pretty darned far from the nearest television broadcast tower, with some significant mountain ranges in between. Consequently, our television reception was kind of... spotty. ABC came in the best—clear and crisp and ready to watch. CBS came in next best—not bad but a little fuzzy. NBC came in worst of all—extremely fuzzy with okay sound, more like radio than television. Unfortunately, in the mid-'80s, all the best shows were on NBC: Cheers, The Cosby Show (yeah, I know, but the show is a stone-cold classic), St. Elsewhere, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, Night Court, Crime Story, Late Night with David Letterman, and the last season of Taxi, for example. A lot of nights growing up, I heard rather than saw these shows.

Sometimes, my mom would go up on the roof and move the antenna this way and that, and I would call up to her to let her know if the reception was better or worse. It was never great, but sometimes we could make it a little better when we did that.

People who grew up in rural areas before the prevalence of cable and satellite dishes will be able to relate, I suspect.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/20/24

Hello, and welcome to the 298th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

If you go to my IMDb page, you'll see that there's a (very old) picture of me, as well as some biographical details, a quote, and a nickname ("G-Dog"). You may wonder where those details came from, or you may just assume that I added those elements myself.

I didn't.

For a long time—like, 17 years—my sole IMDb credit was for playing a "Gen Corp. Guard" in the movie Time Chasers, which rose to fame after being mocked on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Since 2012, my IMDb page has gotten a bit more robust, having now written seven short films (directing two of them), and having penned more than a hundred installments of episodic web series. (I also acted in some of those projects.)

But for those 17 years prior to 2012, I didn't have much reason to visit my (then bare-bones) IMDb page, with its single ignominious credit. (The movie itself isn't ignominious; it's far better than its MST3K mockery would suggest, but my lonely credit wasn't much to brag about.)

For some reason, circa 2005, I visited my IMDb page and was astonished to discover that it now had the aforementioned picture, biographical details, quote, and nickname. This was not something that IMDb would have done on its own, and a private citizen would have had to pay money to add all that stuff to my page.

But what private citizen? That was the question.

My top two candidates were Matt Warren and Chad Anderson. I reached out to Chad first, and he copped to it at once, telling me he'd done it more than a year earlier, and had just been waiting for me to finally discover it.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/25/24

Hello, and welcome to the 299th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

You know about Klondike Bars, right? If you're old enough, you probably remember the commercials from the '80s: A peppy jingle ("What would you do for a Klondike bar?") would play as folks on the street were forced to perform various embarrassing acts in exchange for the chocolate-covered ice cream treat.

The Klondike Bar comes in various flavors: Original (vanilla), Double Chocolate, Mint Chocolate Chip, Reese's, Heath Bar, etc. But my favorite flavor (by a considerable margin) was Cappuccino. I used the word "was" because Klondike no longer offers the Cappuccino flavor. Sometime in the past 20 years, they discontinued it. I can't tell you how many Cappuccino Klondike Bars I enjoyed throughout the '90s and early '00s, and I was severely disappointed when they disappeared from my grocery store shelves. I sent the good people at Klondike a very sternly worded email, demanding the return of Cappuccino, but I never heard back.

It's not an exaggeration to say that over the past twenty years, every single time I've been in a frozen food aisle, I've checked to see if the Cappuccino Klondike Bars have made their triumphant return, and I'm angry and disappointed all over again every single time. Every. Single. Time.

I think this demonstrates my indefatigable capacity for hope, as well as the extraordinary length of time I can hold onto a grudge.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

6/27/24

Hello, and welcome to the 300th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Thirty years ago, for my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary, their kids (Bill, Joanne, Debbie, David, and Patty) were throwing them a surprise party in Massachusetts. I was living in New York, without a car, and the (seemingly) best way for me to get up there was to take a train to Newark, New Jersey the day before the party, and then a flight to Manchester, New Hampshire, where my mother would pick me up.

When I got to the airport, I saw that my flight was delayed. This was before smartphones, so I went up to the ticket counter to get some more information from the attendant.

"That flight's delayed," the attendant clarified.

"For how long?" I asked.

"I don't know," said the attendant. "I can't see into the future." (I was still pretty young, and this level of obnoxiousness from someone who was supposedly there to help came as a bit of a shock to me.)

"Okay," I said. "Why is the flight delayed?"

"Weather."

"Weather?"

"That's right. Weather."

"Weather where?"

"Weather here or weather there?" (I was beginning to feel like I was in a Dr. Seuss book.)

"Weather in New Hampshire," said the attendant curtly, clearly done with this conversation. I wasn't.

"Well, do I have time to go get something to eat?"

"You never know. Boarding could start any time."

"So the plane's here?"

"I can't say. But you should stay near the gate in case they start boarding. They won't stick around long if they're running late."

I waited about an hour, hoping there would be some forward momentum, or at least an update, but no momentum or update forthcame, and the attendant I'd spoken to earlier had apparently taken a powder.

As I mentioned, this was before smartphones, or even flip phones, so the only way I could talk to my mom was to find a payphone, call the Manchester airport, and have her paged. So that's what I did, and when I was finally able to speak to her, my mom informed me that the people at the Manchester airport were telling her that my flight was delayed due to weather in Newark, but that my flight could board at any time, so we should just hang tight.

So hang tight we did, occasionally checking in with each other via the payphone/page system, as my mom grew more and more anxious that I was going to miss the party. Meanwhile, the Newark airport's Arrivals/Departures board was flipping more and more flights over to "Delayed" status, signaling that the issue probably was weather in Newark. I thought about changing my flight to the first flight out the next morning (which would still get me into New Hampshire in time), but I was advised by airline personnel that as long as my flight was "delayed" and not "canceled," I should just continue to hang tight, because, they kept insisting, my flight could board at any time.

We continued hanging tight for six more hours. Six hours without an update, but also without a chance to grab something to eat because, I kept being told, my flight could be called "at any time." Then, all at once, every single flight on the Arrivals/Departures board flipped from "Delayed" to "Canceled." That's when every single traveler in the airport, all at once—hundreds and hundreds of people—made a mad dash to the ticket counter to change their flights. I took one look at that angry, pulsating crowd, and made a beeline for a payphone to call the phone number on the back of my ticket.

"My flight from Newark to Manchester has been canceled," I explained to the agent who answered the phone, "and I need to book myself on the very first flight out tomorrow morning."

"You can do that right at the ticket counter in the airport," the agent replied, quite cheerfully.

"Oh, I already left the airport," I lied, trying to sound regretful.

"That's okay," the agent assured me, still cheerful. "Let me see what I can do for you."

Thirty seconds later, I was booked on the first Newark-Manchester flight the next morning. I called/paged my mom to tell her the new plan, and we both went back to our respective homes, dejected and dog-tired.

A few hours after that, we both got up bright and early to go back to our respective airports, where this time, everything went off without a hitch, and I made it to my grandparents' surprise party with time to spare.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/2/24

Hello, and welcome to the 301st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

A brief follow-up to GTS #270, in which I chronicled my childhood love of a scavenged Bobby Orr t-shirt, which I recreated (in an adult size) for the photo that ran with that secret, and which I am wearing again in this picture: I was also wearing it at the grocery store the other day when a stock boy stopped me and said, "You just made my day."

I didn't know what he was talking about. Maybe for some reason he was happy I had selected a bag of lemons for my cart. I couldn't see how, but as far as I knew, that was the only thing I'd done in his presence.

I asked him how I'd done that, how I'd made his day, and he pointed to my t-shirt.

"Are you a Bobby Orr fan?" I asked him.

"I'm a Bruins> fan," he clarified, and launched into a very long monologue about the team, its individual players, specific games, and possible trades, none of which meant anything to me, but it seemed too complicated to explain that I had created the shirt solely to illustrate a long-running autobiographical series I have going on Facebook, and I actually have zero knowledge about the Bruins. He kept pausing for breath, and I would think he was wrapping up, but no. He had more to say about the Bruins, and then more and more and more.

After about the ninth or tenth pause for breath, I had to break in and say, "I'm sorry, I do have to carry on with my shopping, but I've enjoyed talking to you, and I'm glad you like my shirt."

He waved cheerfully as I pushed my shopping cart away.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/4/24

Hello, and welcome to the 302nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I met Kate at UMass Amherst, I was already in a long-term, long-distance relationship with a woman in Arizona. Kate and I soon developed a pretty intense friendship—physically platonic and technically within the bounds of fidelity, but emotionally charged. We talked on the phone every day, and spent much of our spare time together. This has led to a minor dispute between Kate and me regarding when exactly our relationship began. I maintain that it began with our first kiss, in 1999, but Kate insists that it began a year earlier. The world may never know.

One night, during that ambiguous year, I was on the phone with Kate and I mentioned that my mom used to make quilts, but hadn't made one in a while. "Probably the only way I could get another quilt from her," I said, "is if I got engaged."

Kate was silent for a full beat, and all at once I KNEW she was thinking that this might be my indirect way of announcing that I had gotten engaged for real, which I hadn't.

We powered our way through that awkward, silent beat, declining to concede there had just been any awkwardness at all, but years later, Kate brought this moment up to me, acknowledging for the first time that she HAD been thinking I was about to announce my engagement, but also admitting that her imagination had gone even further than that. She told me she'd been picturing the upcoming "phase" of perhaps years between my impending marriage and the inevitable divorce that would follow when I finally got my act together and recognized just how suited Kate and I were each other, and how she was going to have to wait those years out—which sounds kind of crazy, except she was right: we truly are suited for each other, as these past 25 years (26 years?) have shown.

When Kate brought this moment up, I didn't have to be reminded. I remembered it well, and I remembered KNOWING what had been going on in her head (well, maybe not the marriage/divorce part, but the general gist). It had been a strange, scary, moment that had propelled the slow, continuing redefinition of our friendship. It was one of the first of many times I found myself inside my future wife's head—a pretty cool place to hang out.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/9/24

Hello, and welcome to the 303rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One of my earliest memories is of Diane Normandin taking me outside to show me that it was raining on our neighbor's house, but not ours. No kidding, it was like our neighbor was Job or something.

Now obviously, since it doesn't rain everywhere at once, all rainstorms must have "edges," but never before (and never since) had I stood so close to a rainstorm's edge that was so clearly delineated.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/11/24

Hello, and welcome to the 304th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I needed a drill once, and we didn't own a drill, so I called the neighbors to ask if I could borrow their drill, which felt like a grown-up thing to do, although maybe not as grown-up as actually going out and buying a drill for myself.¹

The husband-neighbor (I've forgotten his name) said sure, I could borrow his drill, so I headed over. They had a front door and a back door, but I had never seen anybody go in or out their front door, so I went to the back door, just as I had seen everybody else do the entire time we'd been living there. (Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, the husband had gone to the front door.) There was a dog sleeping on the back porch, but I ignored it as I climbed the porch steps. Suddenly, the dog woke, growled, barked loudly, and lunged at me. I leaped back, but the dog followed, its jaws snapping, and it managed to take a nice chunk out of my leg.

The husband-neighbor arrived at the back door just in time to witness the canine assault, but said not a thing about it. He grabbed the dog's leash, expressed confusion about my having come to the back door, and handed me the drill (hand-powered, I was dismayed to note).

I went home with the drill, my drill-required task all but forgotten. Kate cleaned and dressed the wound, and we realized we had to inquire about the dog's rabies shot record. So, I called the neighbors again. This time, the neighbor-wife answered. "Hi," I said (because you have to start somewhere). "Is your dog vaccinated for rabies?"

"Yes. Why do you ask?"

"Well," I said, surprised by the question, "your dog just bit me."

"What?" she said, seemingly shocked. I heard her ask her husband, "Did you know the dog just bit Greg?" and I heard her husband's mumbled confirmation in the background.

Unlike her husband, she was mortified. She immediately brought over the dog's vaccination records and, by way of apology, a book of coupons for area businesses. Then she told me, "Just so you know, we're going to put the dog down."

"I'm not asking you to do that," I said, horrified. "That's not something you have to do. Please."

"This has been a long time coming," she said.

I was beginning to understand her husband's muted reaction to the attack, and his failure to disclose the incident to his wife. "Don't do it because of me," I told her. "That's not something I want."

"No," she said, "it's something I want. It needs to happen."

And happen it did, the very next day. RIP, neighbors' dog.

So, that's the story of how I (inadvertently) brought about the death of a dog because I didn't own a drill. But what makes the story even more tragic is that I actually went out and bought an electric drill because I didn't want to use the neighbors' hand-powered one.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹For folks keeping track, these are the same neighbors who had some sort of run-in with the police, supposedly as a result of the Patriot Act, as chronicled in GTS #272.

7/16/24

Hello, and welcome to the 305th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I've written before about my love of the card game Hearts.¹ Some of the fiercest games of Hearts I've ever played were with my dad's college roommate (and lifelong best friend) Claude Caswell, Claude's son Nik, and my dad—all four of us terribly competitive. When Nik and I were young and inexperienced, it usually came down to a battle between Claude and my dad, and more often than not, Claude would prevail, much to my dad's agitation. In the hundreds of Hearts games the four of us played over the years, I can't remember a single game in which my dad didn't (at some point during gameplay) throw down his cards in disgust and declare, "I hate this fucking game."

Once, my dad became so enraged at a game, he leaped up and opened all the kitchen cabinet doors, just so he could slam them all closed again as hard as he could. Another time, he tried to rip an entire deck of cards in half with his hands. These were INTENSE games.

If all that makes my dad seem like a sore loser, well.. yeah, he was. But even when he lost, he'd always say, "Good game" at the end, shaking the winner's hand. And he never gave up. He always came back to the table, and he always kept playing, no matter how bad things got.

Things got very bad indeed (for my dad) as Nik and I grew older and more skilled, and suddenly any one of us could drop the queen of spades on him, or repeatedly duck his cards when he was trying to get out of the lead. I remember once, when I was old enough to play at least a little more savvily, I held onto a high card in a suit I knew my dad still held, because I suspected he was trying to shoot the moon. Sure enough, on the final trick, I scooped up a single sloughed heart, foiling his moonshot attempt and leaving him with twenty-five points and a tightly clenched jaw. "Why did you happen to save THAT card?" he barked at me, accusingly.

"I thought you were shooting, so I held onto a winner," I muttered, nervous under his furious gaze.

"Which is exactly what you're supposed to do," Claude chimed in, defusing the tension (just a little).

Which is not to say my dad always lost. He sometimes triumphed, always savoring those moments when his mind was sharp and his luck was strong.

Still, my dad's love/hatred for Hearts could never match Claude's, Nik's, and my enthusiasm for the game. One night, after a very long game, my dad called it a night and went to bed because he had to go to work in the morning. Claude, Nik, and I, who did NOT have to go to work in the morning, decided to keep playing, three-handed.

Six or seven hours later, when my dad got up, he found us exactly where he'd left us, still playing.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹See GTS #115.

7/18/24

Hello, and welcome to the 306th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My friend James Heflin once described me as "a long-form magician." I'm not sure exactly what he meant by that, but I think it might have to do with my love of the slow burn and the long-delayed payoff.

Over the past ten-plus years, I have, from time to time, buried my nose in my cat Bagel's fur, and whispered, "You smell like raisins."

"Why raisins?" Kate used to ask, genuinely confused, but once she realized I was never going to give her a straight answer, she eventually gave up.

Then one day, a couple of weeks ago, I did it again. "You smell like raisins," I whispered to the cat.

"So she's a raisin bagel?" said Kate.

"That's right," I said.

"I just got that."

"I've been saying it for ten years," I pointed out.

"Yeah, well I finally got it."

Since then, I've varied it up. "You smell like poppyseed," I'll say, or "You smell like Asiago." If I'd tried that earlier, this whole thing would not have gone on nearly as long. But I do like the slow burn.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/23/24

Hello, and welcome to the 307th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Freshman year of college, we—and by "we," I more or less mean Jim Nida, Jeff McMahan, Scott Krugman, Andy Peach, Katherine Stebbins, James Appleby (who had a car) and me—played a lot of Padiddle, a car-spotting game similar to Punch Buggy. In Punch Buggy, you punch a fellow passenger when you spot a Volkswagen Beetle on the road. In Padiddle, you punch when you spot a Padiddle—or a car with one headlight out.

Jim didn't know what a Padiddle was, and didn't understand why he kept getting punched. I mean, he understood SOMETHING was happening to trigger a punch, but he didn't know what it was. He had a lot of guesses, but all of them were wrong. (This was before the internet, obviously.)

Then, one day, Jim asked if a Padiddle was a car with one headlight out. There was a beat of silence among all of us, and then I said:

"He's never gonna get it."

(I feel like my college stories, like every New Yorker cartoon, could all be captioned, "Christ, what an asshole.")

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/25/24

Hello, and welcome to the 308th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In graduate school, I took a writing class with two-time PEN/Faulkner Award-winner John Edgar Wideman, who began the first class by writing "WOW" on a whiteboard and inviting students to expound upon what that might mean.

Students began, hesitantly, by talking about the standard dictionary definition of "wow," and then, at Wideman's prompting, dug deeper, coming up with definitional, contextual, and cultural connotations that might subtly alter or complexify the meaning of the word "wow."

Wideman's point, I think, was to illustrate the malleability of language, and how a single word can take on many nuances depending on emphasis and context.

Expanding on that point, I suggested that perhaps his "WOW" was actually "MOM" upside-down, earning a chuckle from the class, which kept serving up additional interpretations and frames of reference for "WOW."

At the end of the exercise, Wideman revealed that he'd intended the "WOW" to be "MOM" upside-down, which I could tell was supposed to have blown our minds, but which was somewhat undercut by the fact that I'd already suggested it.

Wideman outwardly retained his good humor, but I could tell he was a little pissed at me for ruining his crowning flourish, and I thought:

"Oh well." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

7/30/24

Hello, and welcome to the 309th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I couldn't ditch my training wheels. I was six or seven years old, and I knew how to ride a bike, but without my training wheels, I'd be ridin' like Joe Biden (you know, in that video clip where he falls off his bike).

I hated those training wheels, and more than anything in the world, I wanted to ride my bike without them. Many, many times, I asked the closest available adult to take off my training wheels so I could try again, and many, many times I failed to propel myself more than a couple of yards before toppling over. It was infuriating. I knew all the actions I needed to perform in order to ride a bike properly, but I could not perform those actions competently without the safety net of training wheels.

Then one day, I was thinking about bike-riding, and suddenly, with perfect clarity, an image of riding my bike came into my brain, and all at once, I KNEW with a kind of certainty that I could now ride my bike without any training wheels.

The only adult on the premises (my grandparents' house) was my aunt Debbie, who had never taken off my training wheels before but who knew my extensive, frustrating history with the procedure. I asked her if she could please take off my training wheels, and (after expressing some pretty understandable skepticism) she obliged.

As soon as the training wheels came off, I hopped on my bike and rode it, with no hesitation, no wobbling, and no toppling—a full-fledged bike-rider at last.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/1/24

Hello, and welcome to the 310th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was thirteen, my mom (Joanne Tulonen) and I moved from Fitchburg, Massachusetts (pop. 40,000) to Wilsall, Montana (pop. 237), a strange and wonderful little town that was as different from Fitchburg as a buttercup is from a ball peen hammer. I was going into the 8th grade, and on my first day, I was informed that pre-algebra was on my schedule. I had already taken pre-algebra in seventh grade, so my mom arranged for me to take regular algebra with the 9th graders. That was all fine and good until the following year, when we got a new principal, who decided that my class-hopping was too disruptive, and that I would have to take pre-algebra again along with my fellow 9th graders. Since I had gotten 100% in pre-algebra—meaning, I got not a single thing wrong on all my homework assignments, quizzes, and tests all year (which is not a brag; it's just backstory)—my mom put her foot down and told her new boss that if he made me repeat pre-calculus, I would be withdrawing from the school and staying with friends in nearby Bozeman. He relented (as many of her bosses learned over the years, you don't fuck with my mom), and for the rest of my time in Wilsall, I took a math class one year out of step with my classmates. (That principal was gone after a year.)

But getting back to that first day of school in 8th grade: The class was doing an assignment about sentence structure and parts of speech. Our teacher wrote a very simple sentence on the board: "The woman walked." Then she asked us for various adjectives that could be used to describe the woman.

"Pretty," someone suggested, and the teacher wrote it on the board, between "The" and "woman."

"Young," someone suggested, and the teacher wrote it on the board, right underneath "pretty."

"Old!"

"Angry!"

"Sad!"

"Tired!"

They all went on the board.

"Colored!" someone suggested, and I thought to myself, "Well, THAT'S not going on the board." But nope, up it went, right under all those other adjectives.

The lesson went on, as the teacher called for adverbs, prepositions, and other parts of speech to make the original sentence more complex, but my mind was stuck on "colored." I kept glancing at the word, still on the board, as if trying to convince myself it really had happened.

It really had, and that's when I truly knew I wasn't in Fitchburg anymore.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/6/24

Hello, and welcome to the 311th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Two weeks before I started college, my dad thought it would be fun to drive up to the campus and look around. For many kids, that would likely be a great idea—get the lay of the land, demystify the place, and familiarize oneself with the campus layout. But for me it was horrible, a scary sneak peek at something that I was still mighty nervous about. Plus, my dad kept stopping to talk to people (an introvert's worst nightmare). "This is my son," he'd tell them. "He's coming here in two weeks," and I kept thinking, "Shut up shut up shut up!"

I was mortified, sure that everyone on campus would know me right from the start as the guy whose daddy had to show him around before school started. (It may shock you to learn that this fear turned out to be unfounded.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/8/24

Hello, and welcome to the 312th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When Chad Anderson and I got an apartment in New York, we threw a housewarming party for ourselves, inviting friends already living in the city, and out-of-towner friends to come crash on our couch and/or floor. (The very tall John Dahl would end up commandeering our very short sofa, making the much shorter Emily Locke sleep on the floor.)¹

The day of the party, Chad came to the realization that it would be a catastrophic failure if we didn't have the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack on CD. Luckily, this was easily resolved by a quick dash Circuit City. Later that same day, a few hours before the party was scheduled to begin, we realized that the lighting in our apartment was all wrong, and that our regular bulbs should ideally be replaced by colored light bulbs. Circuit City was no help to us in that department, and we also came up empty at the various hardware and appliance stores in our neighborhood.

Then we remembered this David Letterman bit where he visited a Manhattan store called "Just Bulbs":

We realized, "Hey, we>'re in Manhattan!" So, we headed down to Broadway and 22nd, just as David Letterman had before us, and we loaded up on colored light bulbs, of which Just Bulbs had oodles.

Back at the apartment, every room got a different light color scheme, with the exception of the bathroom, in which we left a regular light bulb for the comfort of our guests. (Nobody wants to pee under a blue light.)

The party was a huge success, culminating on the building's rooftop, which was unfettered by any sort of retaining wall or railing along its edges.

If there are angels who look after fools and drunks, they were pulling double-duty that night, as a score of inebriated twentysomethings cavorted across an unsecured rooftop five stories above the pavement. Nobody was hurt, but ask Katherine Stebbins about the nightmares this induced. Thinking about that night might still give her the willies.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹This was before Chad and I discovered that our sofa pulled out into a bed, as chronicled in GTS #159.

8/13/24

Hello, and welcome to the 313th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When Kate was pregnant with our first child, my grandmother asked her if she'd been having morning sickness. "Oh, yes," said Kate, because she had been, quite severely.

"Interesting," said my grandmother. "I never had morning sickness. Not once with any of my children. But that's because I wanted MY babies."

(I know! Crazy, right? More than twenty years later, I'm still shocked by this, even though it's totally my grandmother, encapsulated.)

"That's NOT why," Kate assured her, "because I really, REALLY want this baby."¹

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹For more (graphic) context regarding Kate's pregnancy, I invite you to read—or reread—GTS #187, if you dare.

8/15/24

Hello, and welcome to the 314th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I can't remember where Kate and the younger child were, but I was home with the older child, who was eight. I was upstairs and he was downstairs. Suddenly, I heard him shout, "Daddy! Come downstairs! Right now! It's an emergency! Hurry!"

I hurtled out of my room and down the stairs, images of various horrific catastrophes flickering through my brain. When I got downstairs, the kid pointed to the TV, which was broadcasting a commercial for vacuum seal storage bags—plastic bags you put sweaters and other clothing in, and then pump out all the air so the bag compresses very flat, freeing up valuable storage space.

"You've always said we don't have enough room for all our stuff," the child helpfully explained. "This could be the answer!"

"That's not an emergency," I advised.

"I didn't want you to miss it."

Years later, he admitted that he'd been hoping this would lead to more toys, since he'd discovered a loophole to create more room in the house.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/20/24

Hello, and welcome to the 315th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I once said to my wife Kate, somewhat offhandedly, "Did you ever think about the fact that a cat could have dyslexia and we'd never know it?"

Now, instead of just saying "Nope" and moving on with her life, my wife decided that this would be a good thing to argue about. (As Nate Bargatze put it, "This is a double-digit married fight. This is when you've already done all the dish fighting or the putting-your-clothes-away fighting. This is when they're trying to mentally break you. They got you almost how they want you, and this is the one that sends it over the edge.")

"No," she said, "because cats can't have dyslexia. Dyslexia is a reading disorder, and cats can't read."

Truth be told, I didn't really have a dog in this fight (so to speak), but the gauntlet had been thrown down, and I wasn't about to back off. "Dyslexia is a disorder that affects how the brain processes visual input," I insisted, "which absolutely could happen to a cat.”

And we were off, neither of us willing to budge. Then I found an article entitled "Can Cats Have Dyslexia?" which asserts: "While dyslexia in cats is still a relatively unexplored topic, there are certain behaviors and indicators that may suggest the presence of dyslexia-like symptoms."

I was triumphant! I had prevailed!I had clearly won the argument.

Except, no. On a dime, Kate immediately responded, "This article says we COULD know it someday. You said we'd NEVER know it."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/22/24

Hello, and welcome to the 316th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Many years ago in New York, I was standing with a colleague named Christopher Hughes, outside the back entrance to our office building, chatting and lingering a little too long on our breaks.

A man I'd never met before approached me and said, "Yo, man, you got a solid quarter?"

I looked at him, not sure how to respond. A solid quarter? As opposed to a liquid quarter? An insubstantial quarter? What the heck was he talking about?

"No," I replied, because it seemed like my best option. When addressed by a stranger on the streets of Manhattan, you can't go wrong with "No."

The man scuttled off, and Christopher, noting my confusion, explained that "solid quarter" was slang for an actual quarter, as opposed to, say, two dimes and a nickel. Someone might trade you twenty-five pennies for a solid quarter so they could make a call from a payphone. (This was back when there were payphones.)

"Oh," I said, finally getting it. "You mean a 'quarter proper.'"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/27/24

Hello, and welcome to the 317th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

"Can you show me how the shower works?" a woman asked me once, so I went into the bathroom, and I showed her how the shower worked, and then I left the bathroom so she could take her shower. This was more than thirty years ago, but I still think about it sometimes, and marvel at what a complete moron I was in that moment.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/29/24

Hello, and welcome to the 318th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Once, in college, Jennifer Hart, Ursula Pontieri, and I were hanging out in Jeremy Braddock's room. Jeremy went to the bathroom, and one of us got the brilliant idea that it might be pretty funny if we were all wearing Jeremy's clothes when he got back. So that's what we did, frantically sprinting from closet to dresser, finding clothes for all of us to wear and throwing them on as fast as we possibly could, laughing hysterically the entire time. We managed to complete this task and get ourselves under control seconds before Jeremy returned, and played it super-cool when he walked back into the room. He didn't notice a thing, but about half an hour later, he said to me, "I've got a shirt just like that... hey, wait a minute!"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/3/24

Hello, and welcome to the 319th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Many years ago, I went to an exhibit of Incan gold at a museum in New York City. Room after room was jam-packed with solid gold artifacts, all precisely designed and intricately filigreed. Each object was accompanied by a little card containing an explanation of the object's purpose. "This comb was used to straighten the hair of the eldest son in noble families." "This cup was used in wedding ceremonies to toast the bride and groom." "This bowl was used to wash the feet of soldiers returning from battle." And on and on. One super-specific description after another, as if detailed accounts of each artifact had somehow been preserved by the Incas.

And then there was a small object that was quite obviously (and there's no polite way to put this) a dildo. This was accompanied by a small card reading, "The purpose of this object is unknown"—the only such card in the entire collection."

This made me think the exhibit's curators were either cowards or prudes. Or maybe they were just idiots.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/5/24

Hello, and welcome to the 320th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Someone on Facebook asked, "What is your favorite quote from 'The Sopranos'? You know, the kind of trivial chit-chat that keeps us occupied while the world crumbles around us.

But anyway, my favorite "Sopranos" quote is kind of personal and specific. I'll tell you what it is, but first you need some backstory:

Years ago, I worked at the website MassLive, and one of my responsibilities was monitoring the town forums for terms of use violations. I regularly received calls from Chicopee mayoral candidate (and later mayor) Richard Goyette, who ceaselessly complained about negative comments about him in the Chicoppe forum. The comments were in no way defamatory. They were simply expressing the opinion that Richard Goyette was, in general, no good, which he wasn't. One day, his wife came into the office to confront me face to face, demanding I take down a comment that read (in its entirety) "Goyette is a lousy mayor." I declined, and wished her a nice day.

Not long after that incident, Mayor Goyette was arrested for shaking down local businesses for cash payoffs. The FBI had a hidden-camera video of him collecting a $5K bribe and, as he stuffed the wad of cash into his pocket, quipping (with a shit-eating grin) "What, no envelope?"

Which brings us to the season six "Sopranos" episode, "The Second Coming," in which Bobby "Bacala" Baccalieri accepts a payoff from a local contractor and semi-crankily jokes, "You don't got an envelope?" which I felt certain was a reference to the Goyette incident (and even if it wasn't, I choose to believe that it was).

And that's why "You don't got an envelope?" is my favorite "Sopranos" quote.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/10/24

Hello, and welcome to the 321st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In grad school, I had a friend. Or maybe he was an acquaintance I was starting to be friendly with. In any case, he had my wife and me over for dinner to meet his fiancee.

"How'd you two meet?" we asked them, and as it turns out it was kind of a funny story, or so they said. You see, his current fiancee had been his first wife's maid of honor at their wedding, and thirty days later, he had slept with her. So: Oops. In any case, now these two were planning on getting married, which, you know, good for them.

I kind of lost touch with this guy (not because of that, but life does just keep trucking along), but I ran into him about a year later. I knew his (second) wedding must have occurred sometime in the past year, so I asked him, "Are you still married?", you know, as a joke, because of the super-short duration of his first marriage.

"We're separated," he curtly replied.

By the way, I HAD run into his fiancee/wife/estranged wife at the grocery store sometime during that year. My wife was pregnant with our first child at the time, and she asked me if we had names picked out. "Connor for a boy and Zoe for a girl," I said. She paused and replied, "Well, Zoe's a very nice name."

I'm not sure what the point of this story is, except that I do seem to have a lot of awkward encounters with casual acquaintances.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/12/24

Hello, and welcome to the 322nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Sometimes, I feel like I was put on this earth as part of a long-form test of my patience, a test I am currently failing. It's not that my life is especially hard compared to anybody else's (in fact, I am so very blessed compared to so many people in the world), but I do feel like there are petty little inconveniences and annoyances, tough breaks and bad luck, that pile up over a lifetime. I'll give you an example from today. Buckle up:

My son and I ordered delivery from She Doesn't Like Guthries, a fine establishment in Lewiston, ME. At 1:26 p.m., I received a text advising me, "Your order has been picked up and is on its way. You can track your order here," and there was a link where I could follow the driver's progress on a map. Neat! I watched as my driver made his way across the bridge into Auburn. He stopped at an address on Union Street, presumably to drop off somebody else's order, and then he continued on his way until he was only a block away from our house. Yay!

But then, mysteriously, he looped around and went back to the first stop on Union Street.

And there he stayed for the next twenty minutes. (I speculated that he was buying drugs, and was obligated to hang out with his drug dealer for.a while.)

The app had given me a phone number for the driver, so I called him to find out what the heck was going on, but he didn't answer. So I continued to watch the map to monitor his progress, of which there was none. Then, at last, he moved on, but he didn't come towards our house. He drove to New Auburn.

I called him again. This time, the phone was answered by a woman who said, in a heavily accented voice, "Uber!"

"Hi," I said. "I'm calling about the food you're delivering."

"Uber!" she replied.

"Okay," I said. "But do you have my food?"

"Uber," she said, and hung up.

I called Guthries to see if we could resolve things, even though Guthrie's employs a third party delivery service (DoorDash), and doesn't have much control over deliveries once the food is out the door. The woman I spoke to promised to research the issue and call me back.

Meanwhile, I received a text, entirely in French:

"Bonjour Gregory, je suis vraiment désolée, j'ai déposé ta nourriture chez un autre client devant sa porte, je suis retourné pour lui demandé il a refusé de ouvrir sa porte, pardonne moi vraiment j'ai oublié."

I don't know French, and I figured this was probably spam, but on a hunch, I activated my iPhone's translate feature, which spat out the following translation:

"Hello Gregory, I'm really sorry, I left your food with another customer in front of his door, I went back to ask him he refused to open his door, forgive me really I forgot."

Then he called me to relay this same sad information. Apparently he had dropped off an order for a customer on Union Street, but had accidentaly left my delivery there too. When he returned to retrieve it, the customer had taken it inside, and now he refused to come to the door to return it.

As an aside: I understand keeping something accidentally left at your door, even if that is a bit of a dick move. But what kind of colossal asshole won't hand it over when the delivery person comes back to retrieve it? We're trying to have a society here!

"How do we fix this?" I asked.

"You could order again," he suggested.

"But I already paid for this order!"

"..."

"I tell you what. Why don't you go back to the restaurant, and I'll have them re-do the order."

"I can't do that if there's not a new order placed."

At this point, I failed whatever patience challenge I was being subjected to, and I was regrettably rude to the driver. I told him, "You're doing a bad job," which maybe wasn't fair and which in any case he already knew, and I ended the call.

I called Guthrie's with this update, and the woman I had spoken to earlier told me she was able to cancel my DoorDash order (though I still haven't been refunded) and would re-make it from scratch. I told her I'd go there myself to get it.

When I arrived at Guthrie's, she told me she was out of the ingredients for my order.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/17/24

Hello, and welcome to the 323rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Let me tell you about the time I was kicked out of a seance.

I was in college, hanging out in someone's dorm room with a bunch of people, and somebody pulled out a ouija board. We all lay our hands upon the planchette, and then I said, in my spookiest voice, "Spirits, who made this strange device?" and I pushed the planchette to point to the Parker Brothers logo in the corner of the board.

"Everyone should take this seriously," our host advised, to no one in particular, but obviously meaning me, so I picked the board up and spun it on my fingers. "Let's make the spirits dizzy!" I exclaimed.

And that's when I was asked to leave, deservedly so.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/19/24

Hello, and welcome to the 324th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This happened a long time ago. I was in my car, stopped at a traffic light, and I noticed in my rearview mirror that the man in the car behind me, alone behind the wheel, was having some kind of fit. Not a seizure, but a full-on eruption of rage. He was screaming and punching his dashboard hard enough to make his whole car sway.

This man was surely unaware he had an audience. Ensconced as he was in his skin of steel and glass, his outburst was presumably intended to be wholly private. Ensconced as I was, and enjoying a privacy this man only imagined himself to have, I studied the rearview's reflection of him coming unglued.

As I watched, I wondered what had gotten him so upset. I recalled that a few blocks back, I'd driven past a funeral breaking up. Maybe that funeral was part of his story. Maybe the departed had been his father, or his wife, or his child. Forced to greet the guests with somber calm for the duration of the service, he was finally allowing himself to unleash the full force of his fury and sorrow.

Or maybe he just hated red lights.

The light turned green. I drove straight, and the guy behind me turned left, the brief interaction between us now complete. It wasn't really an interaction, though, because it wasn't reciprocal, but it had been a communication, a suggestion of a story—or part of a story—passed, however unintentionally, from him to me.

This man has come to mind many times over the years. I'll never know his whole story, obviously, but that would be true even if we hadn't been strangers, or if I'd initiated an actual interaction with him that day (which would have been crazy).

Suppose for a moment I had gotten out of my car, walked back to his car, knocked on his window, and asked him what the matter was. Suppose he hadn't responded by telling me to mind my own business. Suppose he hadn't switched from punching his dash to punching me in the neck. Suppose he'd said, "Meet me at that bar across the street. I'll tell you all my troubles." And suppose we'd done just that. Suppose we'd sat at the bar drinking beers and eating warm salted nuts as this man sifted through his rage to articulate his problems. What then? Then would I truly understand?

I've thought a lot about the inadequacy of language, which is a strange thing for a writer to admit. Adrienne Rich called language "a map of our failures," because language can never fully do what it was designed to do, which is to act as a kind of telepathy, a transfer of thought from one brain to another. It's an imperfect vehicle, an approximation, and it requires a collaboration between the speaker and listener, both of whom must bring something to the exchange for it to have any chance of approaching success.

Here's something I didn't tell you: While I was watching this man have his fit, I was mostly thinking about an instance a few years earlier, when I was doing the exact same thing: driving, screaming, and punching the dash. I had just learned (in a mall, at a payphone, from an answering machine) of a dear friend's death, and more than anything, I wanted to be home, alone, my body curled into a fist, not behind the wheel of a car.

I can't imagine communicating that pain to anyone else. There just aren't any words. But if I actually had spoken to the man that day, it's likely I would have relied on that painful memory to help myself comprehend the depth of his grief. A collaboration between us to achieve understanding.

In Richard Brautigan's short story, "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane," the narrator receives a call while his wife is out. It's his wife's brother, calling with the news that their father has died. The narrator muses:

I tried to think of the best way to tell her that her father was dead with the least amount of pain but you cannot camouflage death with words. Always at the end of words somebody is dead.

This is true, but what if you don't want to camouflage death? What if you want to strip it naked and expose it to everyone? Can words carry the day? Maybe, but probably not completely.

Okay, maybe death is too enormous. What about something smaller? A bathroom sign. A Klondike Bar. A napkin dispenser. A Bobby Orr t-shirt. A pen. Can I communicate these objects to you, conveying their significance, using only words?

I can trick you, maybe. I can inspire you to conjure up your own images of these things. I can describe the pen as bullet-shaped and collapsible, able to write upside-down, used by astronauts. Can you see it? What if I told you that it's heavier than your average pen, like a lump of lead or a fishing sinker? Can you imagine holding it in your hand? What if I told you this: It was a Fisher Space Pen, first introduced to me by my friend Jeff, the one whose death was revealed to me in the answering machine message mentioned above. Jeff had a Fisher Space Pen himself, and he carried that pen with him everywhere, tucked into a small leather notebook. I remember he once leant it to a guy paying his bill at a restaurant, and as the guy handed it back to him, he proclaimed, "That is one smooooth ride, my man." He wasn't wrong. I got myself a Fisher Space Pen just like Jeff's, and I loved it right up until the day I lost it. I mentioned all this in passing to Kate, shortly after we first met, and for my thirtieth birthday (a year later), she gave me a replacement. She'd hunted it down on the internet, you see, back before Google was around to make such a task easier. Back then, Yahoo! only returned useful results if you spelled "spacepen" as one word, which isn't even how it's spelled by the Fisher Pen people.

Anyway, that pen was the first gift she ever gave me.

Does the pen seem different now? More real? Are you bringing your own memories of pens, romantic gifts, and departed friends to the mix? I hope so. You're probably not thinking of the exact same pen I'm thinking of, but this is a collaborative conjuring trick, not genuine telepathy.

For me, the purest way to facilitate this trick is through stories. I'm a sucker for stories, and can't resist the allure of the narrative. It doesn't matter how good or bad a story is. The pull of "what happens next?" is a force I often can't resist. If I'm flipping channels and happen to catch thirty seconds of an old "Charles In Charge," I can become overwhelmed with the need to know if Charles will defeat his fear of public speaking in time to help his friend Buddy, who's lost his voice. (Spoiler alert: He will.)

If you've ever told me a story about your life, it's very likely I remember it. I remember stories people tell me better than I remember stories from my own life (hard as that may be to believe, based on the nature of this series). Ask my friend Jeff McMahan, who still gets freaked out whenever I quote back to him stories he told me only once, nearly forty years ago. I just love stories of all kinds. They're how I process the world.

Ultimately, our understanding of each other comes from the stories we experience together and from the stories we tell each other about ourselves. If you know me primarily through this project, you may have a fuller understanding of who I am through these "secrets" I've been posting over the past few years. But even if you do have a fuller understanding, you'll never have a complete picture. You can't. These secrets have been approximations, my best effort to get you to see and hear and feel what I once saw and heard and felt. But you may have missed the mark on some of them, or I may have missed the mark, and your understanding of what happened may differ significantly from mine. I think of the T.S. Eliot poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which he laments:

That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.

Every communication is an opportunity for miscommunication, but I think we've succeeded, you and I, far more than we've failed.

At least, I hope we have.

Okay, so you might have noticed that this is not a typical Greg Tulonen Secret. For one thing, it's quite a bit longer, and for another, we've strayed fairly far from the original anecdote. That's because this is the third season finale of Greg Tulonen Secrets.

I don't know if there will be a fourth season, but if there is, it's not likely to come for some time. For a long while there, I didn't think there would be a season three, and even when I started season three, I didn't think I could keep it going for very long. That's why I decided to release twice a week rather than every other day (like season one) or every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (like season two). But season three turned out to be the longest season yet, by a considerable margin, with a whopping 162 secrets (exactly as many as season one and season two added together)!

To make a long story short (too late!): this may turn out to be the series finale of Greg Tulonen Secrets.

If it does, so be it.

All together, the entire saga is more than 90 thousand words, which is shorter than "War and Peace," but longer than "A Farewell to Arms." Not exactly something that can be absorbed in one sitting, but I hope at least some of you have made the slog all the way to the end. I mean otherwise, what's the point?

One last thought before I go: You may be wondering, is Greg Tulonen really all out of secrets?

Well, I might be back for a fourth season someday, but there will always be secrets that are too private for me to share, or too sad, or too boring, or too embarrassing, or too shameful.

And then there are those secrets that can never be shared, because the words I'd need to convey them do not exist.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." Thank you for reading.

G-Dog out.

8/18/25

Hello, and welcome to the 325th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Look, what can I tell you? I really thought that the last secret was probably going to be the, you know, last secret. My final bow. The end.

Still, in my lengthy valedictory, I did leave the door open a crack for a potential fourth season. And here we are, right back in the swing of things. Look for new secrets every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. (If you've known me a long time, a few of these new "secrets" may seem familiar to you, but they've never been shared here in this forum.)

Okay, here we go. Season Four of Greg Tulonen Secrets begins... now!

I have a weakness for "limited edition" junk food. Throw out a new or weird twist on a traditional snack, slap a big "LIMITED EDITION" on the package, and I'll be all over it. (White Chocolate Reese's? Sure. Java Twix? You bet.)

Of course, this weakness has led me down some very dark alleys indeed...

For example, "Doritos X13D" was a "mystery flavor" put out by Doritos. Take a moment to contemplate the dubiousness of that scenario: The friggin' Doritos brand put out a chip whose flavor it wouldn't divulge. I mean, the original Doritos flavor is already a weird, mysterious entity unto itself. ("Nacho cheese"? I don't think so.) What is its bastard unnamed offspring going to taste like? Of course, as soon as I saw this, I had to try it.

It turns out, it tasted exactly and uncannily like a Burger King cheeseburger, complete with—no kidding—bun, beef, cheese, ketchup, mustard, and pickle flavors, all in a single chip! This was somewhat disconcerting, if not horrifying. I felt like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park:

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should... You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and now you're selling it, you want to sell it! The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here, uh... staggers me.

I ate the whole bag.

***

And I'll be damned if Doritos didn't get me again the following year with "Doritos Quest," another mystery flavor engineered to taste exactly like... wait for it... wait for it:

Mountain Dew.

That's right: Mountain Dew-flavored Doritos. A melding of two things that should never have been melded in any reality that is good and true and worth living in.

I ate the whole bag. Let us never speak of it again.

***

Of course, the horrifying sequel to Doritos Quest was Dewitos (and let's just take a moment to acknowledge the true cosmic horror of the "Dewitos" neologism). Dewitos was the name of the Dorito-flavored Mountain Dew.

Dorito. Flavored. Mountain. Dew.

I mean... I mean... [shakes head, at a loss for words; all hope for humanity is lost]

***

I realize that all of my examples so far have been Doritos-themed.

So is this one.

These are Cool Ranch-favored-Doritos-flavored potato chips, which I believe is a sign of the singularity.

***

But enough of these horrors. The next Doritos offshoot is something to celebrate! Pickle-flavored Doritos, which are incredible, and (sadly) typically only available in Canada. A while back, I mentioned this Doritos rarity to my friend Karen Dodd, and, since I knew she went up to Canada from time to time, I told her that if she happened to see this flavor in a store she happened to be in when she was in Canada someday, I would appreciate it a whole lot if she could pick me up a bag.

"Sure," she said. "No problem."

Now, some people, they say, "Sure, no problem," and what they really mean is, "In 30 seconds, I'm going to forget this conversation even happened." But when Karen Dodd says, "Sure, no problem," what she really means is:

Sure. No problem.

And so, after Karen's next trip to Canada, she returned with a bag filled with these little green marvels. I rationed them for as long as I could, and then I was (sadly) pickle-flavored-Doritos-free once again.

Then one fine day, the Shaw's in Auburn, Maine accidentally (or maybe it was a market test?) received a shipment of pickle-flavored Doritos, and put the bags out for sale. I stocked up with as many as I could grab. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

The next time I went to Shaw's, the pickle-flavored Doritos were gone.

***

Moving away from the siren-like call of Doritos, we have Pink Grapefruit Tic-Tacs. This is the other danger of limited edition junk food: The possibility that you'll discover something awesome and then it will go away. I feel like Sean Connery in Medicine Man (a movie I have never seen, but this line from the trailer really stuck with me):

I found the cure for the plague of the twentieth century and now I've loshhht it!

Over two or three years, Pink Grapefruit Tic-Tacs were a Walmart exclusive, sold only in the month of May in order to raise money for breast cancer research, and boy oh boy, were these little suckers delicious.

Now, you may ask yourself: Why didn't Walmart sell these Tic-Tacs in the month of October, which is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month? As you can likely guess, in October, Walmart needs the floor space for Halloween items. (To be fair, May is Women's Health Care Month.)

Lamentably, Walmart stopped this practice many years ago (the problem of breast cancer having apparently been solved), and I see no signs the flavor is ever coming back. But for those two or three Mays, I always did my best to stock up as much as I possibly could, as you can see in the picture of me above. Tragically, the Tic-Tacs in that picture are all gone now.

(And no, they don't look like little nipples to me, you pervert!)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/20/25

Hello, and welcome to the 326th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I was once standing by a lake with my three-year-old child, who pointed at something in the water, and said, "Look, Daddy. It's a turtle!"

I looked. "That's a stick," I gently advised.

"No," said the child, belligerent. "It’s a turtle."

"It's a stick, sweetie. See how it's long and skinny and not moving?"

"It’s a turtle!"

I let it go, but later, when we met up with the rest of the family, the child again proclaimed, "We saw a turtle!"

"We actually didn't," I clarified. (So, apparently, I hadn't let it go.) "It was a stick."

"No! It was a turtle."

It went back and forth like that for a little while (like, a week or so) before the child was ready to move on. But by then, the rest of the family (my wife and other child) had decided that it would be hilarious to join the "It was a turtle!" contingent, even though they weren't there. This has been a point of contention in the family for 16 years—though not so much for the kids, who neither remember nor much care about this incident anymore. So, I guess it's mostly just a dispute between me and my wife, who—I must emphasize once again—wasn't there.

Anyway, hence the custom-made t-shirt I'm wearing in this photo. "That joke will only make sense to a very limited number of people," the child (now 19) advised me after seeing the shirt.

"That's right," I confirmed. "Which places it right in my sweet spot!"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/22/25

Hello, and welcome to the 327th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was a child, I hated getting my haircut (and nothing has changed). Nevertheless, I was incredibly proud of my ability to keep my head perfectly still as the barber did his thing. Barbers and hairdressers always remarked upon it, praised me throughout and after all my haircuts for my very still head. I don't know what kind of lolling Weebles these hairdressers were used to, but my head remained as steady as an anvil.

As I got older, my head remained as still as ever, but I got less and less praise for it. By the time I was a teenager, nobody mentioned it at all anymore, and I kind of missed it. Didn't they notice how easy it was to navigate my impassive pate? Maybe, but it no longer impressed. I'd outgrown my talent, which remained as strong as ever, and nobody felt the need to compliment me on it anymore.

Then, in my mid-50s, I had to have an MRI due to some weird growth inside me showing up somewhere it didn't belong during an unrelated catscan for kidney stones. When the MRI was finished, the nurse remarked, "You did such a good job keeping your head still!"

I felt a sudden rush of nostalgia and joy, and just for a moment, I was a child again—until I remembered that I'd just had an MRI due to all the weird stuff going on inside my aging body.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/25/25

Hello, and welcome to the 328th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When Kate and I were first dating, we made a meal together from a recipe found in Ismail Merchant's Passionate Meals: The New Indian Cuisine for Fearless Cooks and Adventurous Eaters. You may know Ismail Merchant from his creative and personal partnership with James Ivory, with whom he created Merchant Ivory Productions, the film company behind a long string of very prestigious movies. Apparently, he was a chef on the side.

The recipe Kate and I chose was Coconut Dumplings in Vegetable Stew ("dhokle"), which the cookbook advised would take about an hour and a half. Right off the bat, that wasn't exactly true, because the first step was:

Soak ½ cup kabli chana (white chick peas) and ½ cup of kala chana (brown chick peas) overnight in cold water. Drain.

That's okay. That's fine. We could do that. Besides, the recipe called for twenty-five other ingredients, most of which were not on hand in Kate's house, so it would take a little bit of time to gather everything we needed.

We started making dinner in Kate's kitchen around 6 p.m. the night after the chickpea soak. One of the first steps read as follows:

To prepare the coconut for the dumplings: Pierce the eyes with a skewer and drain off the liquid. Place the coconut in a 400° oven for 25 minutes, or until the shell cracks. Break the coconut into pieces with a hammer and when cool, separate the white meat from the shell. Remove the brown inner skin, and grate the coconut with a hand grater.

(Upon reflection, we probably could have just bought some unsweetened shredded coconut and called it a day.)

Well, the coconut didn't crack in the 400° oven after 25 minutes, but he had written "or," so we took the coconut out of the oven and hit it with a hammer. The white coconut meat inside was not cooked in any discernable way, and certainly wasn't grateable. (It would have been like trying to grate a marble counter-top.) So back into the oven went the coconut pieces, in the hope that the white meat would soften up.

No matter. There was still plenty more to do. We were instructed by the recipe to use a mortar and pestle to make a paste out of:

6 to 8 hot green chilies, seeded if desired
2 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
1-inch piece of fresh ginger root, peeled and grated
1 tablespoon of cumin seeds

Maybe Ismail Merchant's mortar and pestle were made of sturdier stuff than Kate's, but we weren't having much luck making a paste by hand, so we tossed everything into a food processor to make very tiny pieces of the chilies, garlic, ginger, and cumin seed, though they still didn't form into much of a paste. It was more like a coarse pile of crumbs.

We couldn't make the dumplings until the coconut was cooked and grated, but we could prepare the other dumpling ingredients:

1 cup chickpea flour
1 cup millet flour
½ cup rice flour
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tablespoons ghee or clarified butter, melted
2 teaspoons ground coriander
½ teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon ground red pepper

Once we had all of that measured out, we checked on the coconut. Nope, not done yet. Also, how were we going to "separate the white meat from the shell"? It seemed as though those two elements of the coconut were fused together like hydrogen atoms in a star. "We'll figure that out later," we decided, and moved on to measuring out the remaining ingredients for the stew, which included:

½ cup vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped
6 bay leaves
¼ pound cauliflower, cut into small florets
¼ pound green beans, trimmed
¼ pound shelled green peas
¼ pound red bell pepper, seeded and chopped
½ pound tomatoes, chopped
3 cups hot water
½ pound potatoes, cut into large cubes
¼ pound eggplant, cut into large cubes

Hey, Ismail, are you sure this recipe only takes an hour and a half? Maybe if you have sous chefs who do all your ingredient prep for you before you start. By the way, how's that coconut doing?

At this point, the coconut had been in the oven for about two hours, with no sign that the white meat was softening at all. So we took it out and did our best to separate the white meat from the shell, which wasn't even a little bit easy. We hacked at it with knives and grapefruit spoons and everything else we could think of, and finally had a small pile of coconut meat, which we then had to grate by hand—also not that easy, because it was still pretty damned hard.

Finally, we had everything we needed to make the dumplings:

Mix together the chickpea flour, millet flour, and rice flour in a bowl. Add the oil and ghee. Add a quarter of the green spice paste, the coriander, turmeric, red pepper, and three-quarters of the coconut. Stir to make fairly firm dough, adding a little water if necessary. Form the dough into small, fist-shaped dumplings.

Indeed, it was "necessary" to add a little more water, since our mixture had the consistency of semi-hardened plaster of Paris. But no matter. We formed the dumplings as instructed, and moved on to the next step:

To make the stew, heat the oil in a large saucepan and fry the onion and bay leaves over medium heat for 5 to 10 minutes, until the onion is light brown, stirring occasionally. Add the cauliflower, green beans, peas, peppers, and drained chickpeas, and cook for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in the remaining green spice paste and the tomatoes; continue cooking for 5 minutes. Add the hot water and bring to a boil. Add the dumplings, potatoes, eggplant, and remaining grated coconut. Season with salt and simmer, partially covered, over low heat for 30 to 40 minutes, or until the chickpeas are tender. Remove bay leaves and serve with plain boiled rice.

Now, wait just a minute, Ismail. This recipe was supposed to take an hour and a half? The cooking time alone was 70 minutes. Does that mean we were supposed to have done everything else the recipe required in the twenty minutes before we started cooking? That's madness, I say. Madness!

Also, not to pile on, but that "30 to 40 minutes until the chickpeas are tender" was a lie, because the chickpeas were still very, very hard after 30 to 40 minutes.

To make a long story short (too late!), Kate and I sat down to eat our dhokle around 1 a.m. And guess what? This stew, which we had been toiling over for the past seven hours, was bland. Flavorless. Didn't taste like anything at all. The dumplings may as well have been boiled Play-Doh. We ate it anyway, because we'd be damned if we didn't get something out of all that work we'd put in, but I can't say we much enjoyed it.

So the stew itself wasn't very good. Whether that was Ismail Merchant's fault or ours, I couldn't say for sure (though we definitely blamed Ismail Merchant), but I can't imagine anything else I'd rather have been doing that night.

You see, throughout the entire process—the struggles, the tedium, the confusion, the frustration—Kate and I maintained our good humor, a dynamic that has remained between us, even in difficult times, over the past twenty-six years. We laughed and joked and talked about "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and made fun of Ismail Merchant and generally had a pretty terrific time together, and I wouldn't trade that for anything.

Listen: I have included the full text of the recipe—everything you need to try to make it yourself. If you do, and if you have more success than Kate and I did, please let us know.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/27/25

Hello, and welcome to the 329th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

The first night back to school, senior year of college, there were parties all over campus. I started a little early, in someone else's dorm room, downing shot after shot of cheap tequila before heading out into the night.

As it turns out, when I am very drunk on tequila, my first impulse is to track down everybody I hate, and alert them to the fact that I hate them.

Like:

Can I tell you something?" [good-naturedly drapes arm around shoulder] "I've never liked you. I've really wanted to tell you that for a long time now, and tonight's the night!

or:

Did you know that I do a kind-of mean (but really accurate) impression of you behind your back? Everybody you know thinks it's hilarious. Do you want to hear it? [does it]

or:

Hey, I always wanted to ask you; I'm not sure if you'll know the answer or not: Did you know that you're a douchebag? I see you're laughing, like you think I'm joking around. I assure you I am not.

Amazingly, no physical harm came to me that evening, unless you count throwing up into the sink of the cafeteria bathroom.

(As I once noted, I feel like my college stories, like every New Yorker cartoon, could all be captioned, "Christ, what an asshole.")

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

8/29/25

Hello, and welcome to the 330th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One January day, I was eating lunch with my friend Barry at a deli near where we worked. This was a "rougher" section of Portland, Maine, which means it was still mostly pretty safe, but studded with homeless shelters and soup kitchens. This particular deli was making a stab at upscale, featuring gourmet sandwiches and a weekly brain teaser handwritten on the dry-erase board near the door.

It was a genuinely warm day, a day that felt like spring had arrived, even though it certainly hadn't. We were just finishing our meal when Barry pointed out the window, urgently murmuring, "Look! Look!"

I looked out the window, and I saw a homeless man on the back of a shopping cart, grinning wildly as he sailed down the middle of the steeply inclined street outside.

Never mind for a moment that what he was doing was extraordinarily dangerous. Never mind that the shopping cart was undoubtedly stolen. Never mind that the temperatures outside were going to dip back down below zero before the month was out, putting this man in even greater, long-term jeopardy. Never mind all that. For that brief fraction of a second that he glided past the deli window, all I could perceive was the look of limitless joy on his face. I couldn't remember the last time I had seen happiness that expansive, even in my own children.

Joy is such a mystery, and can be found in the most fleeting of moments.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/1/25

Hello, and welcome to the 331st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Bagel (bottom right) is not a good cat. She's poorly behaved. She's mean to the other cats. She bites people. She scratches people. She wakes me up every morning at 6 a.m. by knocking things off my bookshelf and swatting my nose. She once grabbed an entire tuna fish sandwich I was eating right out of my hand.

I adore her.

I love this cat more than any other animal I've ever known, and furthermore, no animal I've ever known has ever loved me as much as Bagel loves me. It's astonishing how attached she is. She follows me around the house. She comes when I call her. She does this thing when I'm sitting or lying down, where she'll perch on my knees, facing forward, and then do a kind of trust fall backwards onto my lap, landing belly-up, her paws waving in the air, inviting me to rub her tummy. When I'm not home for an extended period, she wanders around the house, moan-crying in performative despair.

Here she is in 2014, waiting for me to get home from work. I was greeted by this sight when I got out of my car every single weekday until 2020, when my job moved to a work-from-home model.

Here she is, after I came in and sat down, so excited to see me, she draped herself over my shoulders.

(You've never seen a happier animal once work-from-home became the norm.)

My kids are non-entities to Bagel. I doubt she could pick them out of a lineup. She seems to like Kate okay, but she also sees Kate as a rival for my attention. Whenever Kate and I are talking or snuggling in bed, Bagel will do her best to get between us. Her favorite position is to face me, her nose inches from mine, and swish her tail across Kate's face.

Kate has always insisted that Bagel was doing this on purpose, but for a long time, I maintained that she just didn't have very good situational awareness, and didn't have a firm grasp on where her tail was at any given moment. You know how cats sometimes chase their own tails, spinning around and around, like they have no idea that the tail is a part of them? Like that.

Then one day, while Kate was sleeping, Bagel took up her signature position, facing me, her tail twitching behind her. But Kate was just a few inches out of reach of Bagel's tail. Bagel looked back over her shoulder to see what the problem was, and then, like a trucker backing her rig up to the cargo bay doors, Bagel took three deliberate steps backwards, looking back over her shoulder the entire time, until her swishing tail could reach Kate's sleeping face.

Never before in my life had I seen a cat deliberately walk backwards. After some research on YouTube, I know they can walk backwards, but it mostly seems to be a trick they'll do for a cat treat. In this case, the only "treat" for Bagel was the satisfaction of knowing she was pestering Kate.

After that, there was simply no denying that Bagel was swishing her tail across Kate's face on purpose.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/3/25

Hello, and welcome to the 332nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Senior year of college, my roommate (Matt Warren) asked me, out of the blue, "Would you live on just beer and donuts for a week?"

In the spirit of "yes and," I replied, "Sure."

Matt was surprised. "Really?"

"Well," I clarified, beginning to think it over. "Would I get to choose what kind of donuts?"

"As long as they're donuts."

"So most days, it could be plain donuts with no frosting?"

"If you want."

"There would have to be some money involved. And I'd also be able to drink some water every day."

"How much water?"

"Uh, two liters, I guess."

"How much money?"

"How much ya got?"<

And so began Matt's quest to raise enough money to make this weeklong beer-and-donuts diet worth my while. I cannot recall how long the fundraising campaign lasted, but I do recall Matt riding up and down a dorm elevator, soliciting everybody who came aboard. I also remember him circulating in and around various frat parties, sauntering up to drunken potential pledges, launching his pitch with, "Have I got a deal for you!"

The idea was, Matt would document my week for a video class—you know, like Super Size Me, except fourteen years before Super Size Me. Really, a video like that could have gone viral on YouTube, except it was fifteen years before YouTube launched. All pledgers would be invited to a special screening of Matt's documentary. Matt could have just promised to send them a link, except this was three years before websites were designed for and accessible to the general public. And It would have been easier to obtain monetary promises on GoFundMe, except it was twenty years before GoFundMe launched.

(I think what I'm saying is that Matt was ahead of his time.)

I can't remember how much money Matt raised. No, wait. That's not actually true. I remember exactly how much actual money he raised: Zero dollars. However, he received promissory pledges amounting to around $750, of which Matt would get $300. I would get the rest: $450—or about $1,112.25 in 2025 dollars. Not a bad haul!

Okay, except as the fundraising campaign dragged on, some doubts began to bubble up into my consciousness. Namely:

I told my mother about it, and she was strongly opposed. "Don't live on beer and donuts for a week," she advised me directly. She was usually fine with me making my own dumb decisions without comment, so her insistence this time was notable.
Matt was a heck of a salesman, I have to say. He was able to extract a promise of money out of the most reluctant of potential pledgers. However, I was less confident in his ability to extract actual dollars out of his pledges, many of whom made their monetary promises while extremely drunk.
Several people advised me that this would be very bad for my health.
During the fundraising campaign, I started dating a lovely woman, and it was getting kind of serious. That early in our relationship I was not willing to smell like beer and donuts for a week.

While I told Matt that doubt #3 was the doubt that concerned me most, it was really doubt #4 that sealed the deal. And so, I backed out, much to Matt's (and perhaps some backers') disappointment. I don't regret it (see #4 above), but I'll admit, it would have been a pretty fun documentary.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

UPDATE: After reading this secret, Matt reminded me that our friend Tom Chambers deserves some fundraising credit, as he was instrumental in raising that much money (in pledges).

And then Tom himself weighed in with more details and thoughts about the fundraising, much of which I wasn't present for:

"You omitted a key part of our sales pitch: that this would actually be a healthy diet. Fruit-filled donuts (jelly) provided vitamins, crème filling provided dairy, and nut toppings provided protein."
"Some people got off the elevator a floor early to get away from us."
"There were many questions from potential donors along the lines of 'What kind of beer?'"
"Several experts suggested alternating between calorie-rich Foster's and cheap lite beer."
"We need to revive this campaign on GoFundMe. As Greg wrote, [Matt was] ahead of [his] time!"

9/5/25

Hello, and welcome to the 333rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Charlotte's Web is a significant book in my life in that it's the first chapter book I ever read all by myself. I was five years old, the same age my older child was when I read it to him over multiple bedtimes. He was enchanted, as was I all over again. I hadn't read it all the way through in over 30 years, and I found it just as enjoyable as I did back then—maybe even more so. E.B. White's dry, witty prose is a delight.

(NOTE: There are Charlotte's Web spoilers to follow. I can't imagine that being an issue, but one can't be too careful.)

The kid was full of questions about what was going to happen in the story, how things were going to turn out. Mostly, I told him he had to wait to find out, but I did let him know that Wilbur was not going to get killed for the Christmas feast, because he was quite anxious about that possibility. (He didn't yet know that he should have been worrying about Charlotte.)

His big question as we made our way through the book was how Charlotte was going to save Wilbur.

"We'll have to keep reading to find out," I told him.

"Does she use her web to save him?" he asked, which kind of surprised me, because, of course, that's exactly what she does.

"What makes you ask that?" I said.

"I don't know. That's what she's good at."

Smart kid. Yeah, I know. The book is called Charlotte's Web (a big clue by itself), but still, as a dad, I was impressed.

One Friday night, after about a week of reading a little bit each night, we had six chapters to go. I figured three chapters Friday night, three Saturday night.

Best laid plans.

In Chapter 18 ("The Cool of the Evening"), there's a bit of ominous foreshadowing in which Charlotte is too tired to sing to Wilbur. My son stopped me about three-quarters of a page later. "Daddy," he said, "can you tell me what's happening to Charlotte?"

"Well," I said. "I think she's tired."

"Is she dying?" (The kid cuts to the chase like no one I know.)

"We'll just have to keep reading."

"But does she die in this book?"

"We'll just have to keep reading."

"Can you just skip ahead to the part where they tell us she doesn't die?"

"No, honey. We'll have to keep reading."

Well, after that, there was no stopping. He was unwilling to put the book down for the evening until he learned Charlotte's fate. I warned him that some sad things might be coming, but he said he'd rather get the sad over with than feel sad the next day. After every chapter, he muttered: "I hope Charlotte doesn't die."

When Charlotte did die, Connor tore the book from my hand and said: "Is this the end or is there more that comes after this?" There's more, of course, but the blow was still pretty hard.

All in all, he took it well, though he had a lot of questions about why anyone would write a book with such a sad part, since anything you want can happen in a book. "People can live forever in books," he told me.

A few days later, he told his grandmother all about it, adding (in a slightly disgruntled tone of voice): "They shouldn't have called it Charlotte's Web. They should have called it Charlotte Dies."

As a postscript, I should mention that Greg Tulonen completionists (hi, Mom!) may recognize this incident, which has previously been presented in comic strip form in my non-fiction web comic, Actual Conversations With My Kids.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/8/25

Hello, and welcome to the 334th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was a kid, my grandparents had a parrot named Paul. Paul was a mean, surly creature, who would lunge at anybody who walked by his cage (or maybe it was just me), smashing his face into the bars so his beak had the best chance of pecking me. My grandfather built a wooden walkway along the top of all the walls in the living room, so Paul could come up out of his cage and pace around the perimeter of his room, glaring down at all of us, and occasionally shitting on furniture. His feathers were clipped, so flight was not an option for him, though very occasionally, he did give it a try.

My dad and his sisters were not fond of Paul, but arrangements needed to be made for Paul's care, for you see, parrots can live up to 100 years, meaning Paul would likely outlive my grandparents. And so, it was decided, somehow, that Paul would be bequeathed to me.

I say "somehow" above, but my grandmother actually had an origin story to justify it. It's a cute story, but I have some doubt as to its veracity. According to my grandmother, when I was two years old, I was fascinated with the parrot, and outright asked my grandmother if I could have it when she died, which she agreed to. A few days later, I supposedly asked, "When are you gonna die?"

Funny? Yes! But this story sounds so unlike me in so many ways, I have a hard time believing it's true. Nevertheless, in my family, the story was treated as gospel, and—much to my vexation—my parrot inheritance was considered a done deal.

Then one day, when my grandfather was trimming Paul's nails, he accidentally nicked a vein, and his beloved parrot bled to death in his arms. (Listen, I'm not a monster. I fully acknowledge that this was a shocking and sad incident for my grandparents.)

"You're off the hook," my grandmother told me, a little sullenly, the next time I saw her. I offered my condolences, but I was relieved and she knew it, and she knew I knew she knew, and there was nothing I could do about that.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/10/25

Hello, and welcome to the 335th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Last time, I shared a secret about an attempt to foist an unwanted inheritance upon me thanks to a possibly apocryphal story told by my grandmother. Believe it or not, I have another secret in the exact same category.

Immediately after my grandfather's funeral, my grandmother asked me, "When are you going to pick up the boat?"

"What boat?" I asked.

"Your grandfather's boat," said my aunt, joining the gaslighting. "You said you wanted it."

"I did?" This was news to me. I have never, ever had any interest in owning a boat.

"You certainly did," said my grandmother.

"When was this?" I said. "Was this the same time I asked for the parrot?"

"When you were a kid," said my aunt.

"In 1995," said my grandmother, with odd specificity.

"In 1995, I was a fully grown man-"

"Well, you'll always be a kid to me," my aunt interrupted, with a loving smile.

"A fully grown man," I said again, "living in an apartment in New York City! I can't imagine asking for a boat while living in a New York City apartment."

"So, you're saying you don't want the boat?" said my grandmother, clearly miffed.

"I'm saying I have no memory of ever expressing any interest in the boat."

"Well, you did," said my grandmother, "but that's fine. We can make other arrangements."

I'm willing to concede that when two people remember things differently, it's possible for both of them to be certain that they're the one in the right, when one of them is clearly wrong. But in this case, I'm 100% certain I was in the right, even when it was two against one. In my next secret, I'll tell you why.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/12/25

Hello, and welcome to the 336th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

"How can you be so sure you didn't ask for the boat?" some people may be wondering after reading my last secret.

I'm sure because I've never liked boats. Never in my life. I have an early memory of being invited to join a sailboat race across Lake Winnisquam in Meredith, New Hampshire. In one boat would be my mother and uncle; in the other, my grandparents and aunt. I refused on the grounds that I was 100% certain that the sailboat was going to tip over in the middle of the lake.

The race proceeded without me, and when they were halfway across the lake, the assistant waterfront director, peering through a pair of binoculars, informed me that my mother's sailboat had tipped over. I didn't know if that meant my mother was dead or not, but I thought it probably did, and I wondered why the assistant waterfront director was being so calm about it.

Twenty minutes later, Lake Patrol helped tow the sailboat in, and I saw that my family was fine, but I never did warm up to boats. I mean, I'm not afraid of them anymore, and I'll ride in one if logistically necessary or socially expected. But I would never seek one out—not to ride in, and certainly not to own.

It's sort of like my distaste for haircuts. The idea of being stuck in one place for a duration outside my control, with no possible exit, is simply... disagreeable to me.

Look: Here I am in the web series Ragged Isle, rather graphically expressing my feelings about boats:

(For the full context of this scene, visit raggedisle.com.)

So in any case, that's why I'm so sure I never requested my grandfather's boat.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/15/25

Hello, and welcome to the 337th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My favorite dictionary entry of all time, by a considerable margin, is for the pineal gland. I came across this definition more than 30 years ago, and it has stayed with me ever since:

I love the matter-of-fact lack of judgment here, affording equal credence to the spiritual, the scientific, and the crackpot.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/17/25

Hello, and welcome to the 338th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Very soon after giving birth to a litter, my grandparents' cat was hit by a car. The whole family helped take care of the newborn kittens, feeding them milk from little eyedroppers and swaddling them in blankets to keep them warm. My grandparents' dog Sasha also pitched in, adopting the tiny kittens as her own. The kittens took right to Sasha as a mother figure, even trying to nurse off of her, which Sasha patiently endured, even as it produced no results.

You know how mother cats carry their young around by the scruffs of their necks? That's what Sasha did, only she was so much bigger than the kittens, their whole heads would end up in Sasha's mouth. Sometimes, guests would be startled to see Sasha walk into the room with a newborn kitten dangling out of her mouth like a half-eaten sausage.

But Sasha was ever-so careful with those kittens, never missing a step, setting them down with extreme gentleness and care. The kittens would shake their soggy little heads, and toddle after Sasha wherever she went next.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/19/25

Hello, and welcome to the 339th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I lived in New York, I had a friend named Jeff Gilbert, a gregarious fellow who hailed from Abilene, Texas.

Raised by extremely fundamentalist Christian parents, Jeff had been sent exclusively to private religious schools that used no actual textbooks in its classrooms, but rather semi-literate religious tracts laced with jingoism and bigotry: pamphlets describing the hellfire awaiting homosexuals, Communists, and Democrats; stuff like that. The school's principal advised the students that if they wore their shirts untucked, they were probably "faggots." (The principal tucked in his sweater, just to be on the safe side.)

At age 12, mindful of the fact he was not receiving a proper education, Jeff began, during his study halls, to read a complete set of encyclopedias he'd found in the library amid all the moralizing bric-a-brac. Methodical to a fault, he started with the As, and by the time he'd graduated high school, he'd made his way through the entire set—which explains why he always seemed to have ready access to numerous obscure facts in any given situation.

Jeff liked to describe himself as a misanthrope, but that was pure self-delusion. Though typically cynical and often sarcastic, his southern-bred politeness and charm were not easily shaken, nor was his natural curiosity about other people. If you walked through the East Village with him, you'd hear "Hi, Jeff" a dozen times over—from shopkeepers, street musicians, drug dealers, and homeless people. Jeff would always stop to talk (admittedly a pain in the ass to the more destination-focused among us), and he'd always know their names.

Which may be one reason why Jeff was always so tragically, colossally, staggeringly late wherever he went. He lived a few blocks away from me, so when he would call me to tell me he was coming over, I'd put a movie in the VCR and watch it straight through to the end while I waited. His sense of time was somewhat fluid. "I should be there in about ten minutes," he'd have estimated, ludicrously.

One day in 1995, for no particular reason that I can remember, we took the tramway from Manhattan to Roosevelt Island on the East River. You may have seen this tram in action in such movies as Sylvester Stallone's dandy thriller Nighthawks, or maybe Léon: The Professional, or Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. In movies, the tram is always in jeopardy, but Jeff and I rode it without incident.

Roosevelt Island has adopted several names and identities over the centuries, but when Jeff and I visited, it held at its center a planned community of middle-class, slightly shabby, sterile cement apartment buildings erected in the '70s. We explored this mostly automobile-free neighborhood for a while, until an island patrol car eased past us a couple of times, indicating it was time for us to move on.

The outskirts of the island revealed evidence of some of its former functions: At the southern tip, the ruins of the abandoned Smallpox Hospital. At the opposite end, an elegant and beautiful nineteenth-century stone lighthouse.

Since our visit, the island has transformed itself once again, replacing its notorious and crumbling Octagon lunatic asylum (whose grim conditions were once exposed by Charles Dickens) with a couple of luxury high-rises.

Twenty-eight years ago tomorrow, Jeff was killed by a hit-and-run driver on Houston and Essex in Manhattan. Occasionally, he shows up in my dreams, never failing to make me laugh with his sly, sardonic wit.

(As you might remember, I've mentioned Jeff two or three times before in this series. He'll turn up again.)

The above photograph is the only one I have of the two of us. The picture quality isn't great, but I laugh every time I see it. We're in a moving van we rented on the cheap from some dodgy, cash-only outfit on Tenth Avenue. The Ryder logo on the sides of the truck still visible through its sloppy white paint job, it had likely been decommissioned or stolen, but as I recall, it served us well that day. I think we were moving Jeff into or out of his girlfriend's apartment; I can't remember which. (They had a volatile relationship, those two.)

I still have a photo I took of that lighthouse on Roosevelt Island. Looking at it now, I can see Jeff standing at the base of the tower, although I don't think I realized he was in the picture when I took it. (I was focused exclusively on the lighthouse, and had backed up quite a ways to get the entire structure in frame.) He's just a tiny figure with his back to the camera, but I know his jacket, his hair, his posture. He's leaning forward, slightly stooped, standing directly in front of the lighthouse, his face just inches from the stone. He might be reading a plaque or scrutinizing a detail of the masonry.

Even in a photograph, even at that distance, even with his back to me, I still recognize Jeff's air of intense concentration—absorption so complete, I'm sure he wouldn't have heard me had I called to him at that moment. I can imagine him standing there, trying to derive, from whatever small element of the lighthouse he's examining, a greater understanding of the whole thing.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/22/25

Hello, and welcome to the 340th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Freshman year in college, I acted in a play called "The Dining Room," by A.R. Gurney. The play is a comedy of manners, a series of scenes all set in the dining rooms of upper-middle-class American WASP families, in different time periods across a changing American culture.

I was in the first scene with a woman named Pamela Frederick, lovingly known to cast and crew as "Pammy Jo." She was playing a real estate agent, and I was playing a prospective buyer. Her first line, the first line of the play, was, "...and the dining room," which is (obviously) the name of the play, as well as the setting of the play's one and only set.

After several weeks of rehearsals, opening night came at last. I walked out onto the stage with Pammy Jo, and she said, "...and the living room."

Luckily, my next line was, "Oh boy," because that's exactly what I felt like saying in the moment. We powered through the rest of the scene, and when we got backstage, Pammy Jo collapsed into a little ball of mortification.

But it was fine. It was all fine. The rest of the play went great. The audience was happy, the director was happy, and the cast was happy, all of us. But man oh man, what a way to begin. I mean... oh boy!

Oh, and hey: here's a photo of the cast and crew. That's me on the right, squeezed between the two blondes, neither of whom is Pammy Jo. (She's the blonde on the left.)

And here's the poster, signed by the cast.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/24/25

Hello, and welcome to the 341st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

"Echoic memory" is the brain's very brief retention of auditory data before it's processed and transferred into short-term memory. Unlike visual input, which usually can be perceived for as long as the observer desires, auditory input can only be perceived once, in real time. So, for a few crucial seconds, that auditory data is held in a kind of "holding tank" in your brain, giving you time to fully absorb and process what you're hearing. That holding tank is your echoic memory.

When somebody's talking to you, you store every word they say in your echoic memory, as your brain connects those words and processes the entire sentence. If you've ever been half-listening to someone while doing something else—reading a book, say—and not really paying attention to what they were saying, but then you "played back" in your mind the very last thing that person said, you were accessing your echoic memory.

Once, when my older child was two, we were sitting at the kitchen table—he in his high chair and I in my regular chair. I was reading a book, and absentmindedly eating some pine nuts out of a bag. I had also tossed a fistful of pine nuts on the high chair tray in front of the child.

He was happily chattering away, but I was reading and taking little note of what he was saying. Then, something snagged at me, and, accessing my echoic memory, I played back in my head the last thing he had said, which was:

"I put a pine nut in my nose."

I looked up at him sharply. He was smiling and playing with the pine nuts. "What did you do?" I said.

He just grinned at me and said nothing.

"Did you put a pine nut in your nose?"

He laughed and laughed and laughed.

"Honey, did you put a pine nut in your nose?"

"Yes," he said, between giggles.

I called out to Kate. When she came into the kitchen, I brought her up to speed, and we talked about what we should do next—like should we maybe take him to the emergency room?

Aside: When Kate was a small child, she stuck a doll's shoe up her nose (so that's where the kid got it from). Her parents decided to take her to the emergency room, but on the way, Kate sneezed, and the shoe came hurtling out. Except, I have always maintained that she didn't actually sneeze, but simply said, "A... shoe!" very vehemently. (I'm the only one in the family who finds that joke funny.) End aside.

Before committing to a complicated and expensive ER visit, I gathered a pair of tweezers and a flashlight, and, with Kate holding the child's head still, I was able to retrieve the errant pine nut.

That was the last time we offered the kid pine nuts. He's twenty-two, so I'm sure it would be fine now, but we've just gotten into the habit of not giving him pine nuts, and, well, it's really hard to break a habit.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

9/26/25

Hello, and welcome to the 342nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

If you've known me for any length of time, you may have encountered this story before,¹ but there's a bonus element this time that you've never encountered before, so keep reading!

Once, in the late '90s, I was standing in the UMass-Amherst Writing Center copy room, which was adjacent to a dingy and cramped conference room, in which two of my fellow teaching associates, Kate Dionne and the late, great Mary Reda (both of whom I was friendly with but neither of whom I knew particularly well), were shooting the breeze, awaiting their turn at the copier.

From my vantage point in front of the copier, I couldn't see them, but I could clearly hear their conversation. Kate was telling Mary how much Mary's brilliance reflected back on her. "I don't know what I'll do when you graduate," Kate was saying. "People think I'm smart now, but only when I'm around you."

That's when I decided to step into the conference room and say, "Don't worry, Kate. I never thought you were smart." I watched her eyes widen in surprise (as if she were deciding whether to be insulted or amused), not realizing that I was already snagged, already so tuned in to Kate that I would monitor things she was saying in another room.

A few years later, I found myself standing on the lawn of the Nonantum Inn in Kennebunkport, Maine, marrying the very same woman whose intelligence I had once insulted (jokingly! jokingly!).

Addendum: Look, I've come to realize that AI art is a scourge upon this earth, but before I fully came to that realization, I did create an AI-generated song about this incident, and then played it for an unsuspecting Kate. She was... nonplussed.

Don't Worry, Kate

That'll be the last time I'll ever share any AI-generated music on this site. I promise.

Tune in next time for a secret about our wedding day.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹"Then how is it a 'secret'?" you might be asking. The answer is simple, my friends: "Look over there!" [throws smoke bomb; runs away]

9/29/25

Hello, and welcome to the 340th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Kate and I were married at the Nonantum Resort in Kennebunkport, Maine. It was our first choice of venue, and we booked it sixteen months in advance.

A couple of hours before the ceremony, I was sitting on the grass behind the Nonantum with some friends from college, thinking about the next chapter of my life. It was warm and sunny and pleasant out there, but suddenly, I stood up. "I should go write my vows," I said. "I'm getting married in a couple of hours."

That detail horrifies my mother, who considers deadlines to be inviolable (which, admittedly, this one absolutely was), but I knew that Kate was in the same boat, and besides, both of our vows turned out great, as did everything else: great food (those bacon-wrapped scallops—yowza!), great staff, great weather, great everything.

After the ceremony and reception, we went out with a few wedding guests to a local bar or three to continue the celebration. At one of the bars, we ran into a couple who had also gotten married that day, but at another (and let's face it, lesser) venue. When it emerged that we had gotten married at the Nonantum, the bride got noticeably frostier, revealing that they had tried to get the Nonantum, but it had already been booked (by us).

Kate and I tried to be gracious and jovial, because after all, today was a day of celebration, no matter the venue. It was, for all of us, our wedding day! But she wasn't having it. She was pissed, and she stayed pissed for the rest of the night—not that we interacted with her much after that.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/1/25

Hello, and welcome to the 344th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I worked at HBO Studio Productions in New York, I was, for a time, responsible for hand-labeling and sending out VHS copies of HBO programming (before the official broadcast dates) to groups of internal stakeholders—which is how I snagged tapes of every single episode of "The Larry Sanders Show" before it aired.

All these tapes I was labeling were for HBO and Time Warner employees only, mostly to help develop marketing and promotion materials, but sometimes as an unofficial employee perk. They were not made available to the public or the press; they were for internal use only. Higher-quality, professionally labeled tapes were sent out to the press from another department entirely.

The wording for exactly how these internal tapes should be labeled would always come from someone in the corporate office. I would type it word-for-word into my computer, and print out as many labels as required. It was usually around 20-50 tapes, but for special events, it could be quite a few more.

In 1992, HBO paid $20 million to Michael Jackson for the broadcast rights to his October 1 concert in Bucharest (thirty-three years ago today!). The concert would be broadcast on October 10, and between October 1 and October 10, I was responsible for preparing, labeling, and shipping out roughly two thousand copies of the concert to the usual stakeholders, as well as many other interested parties in the HBO/Time Warner ecosystem.

I labeled these tapes exactly as instructed: "Michael Jackson Live in Bucharest: The Dangerous Tour" (which was something of a misnomer, since the concert was not being broadcast live). As you might imagine, printing all those labels and labeling all those tapes (and their cases) took an enormous amount of time and effort, but I got it done. Huzzah!

Before a single tape had been sent out, Michael Jackson somehow got wind of the exact wording on those labels, and was enraged that it did not include the phrase "King of Pop," as was contractually required for any media produced in Jackson's name.

So, despite the fact that these tapes were not going to be shared with the public or the press, Jackson (or rather, his representatives) insisted that all two thousand tapes be relabeled to include the "King of Pop" descriptor—the labels on the tapes themselves and the labels on the tape cases. This was going to take longer than the remaining workday hours before October 10 would allow, so I was tasked with coming in after hours to relabel all two thousand tapes (and cases). I was assigned one temp to assist me in this endeavor.

Fortunately for me, that temp turned out to be Jeff Gilbert, who became a dear friend.¹ Over the many hours it took to complete the relabeling process, we bonded over literature, politics, wordplay, pop culture, and the absolute absurdity of our task. We agreed, in passing, that if the Patrick Swayze movie Road House happened to come on premium cable, it was worth sticking around at least until Kelly Lynch's nude scene. (Such different time it was, before the rise of the internet as we now know it.)

At this point in today's secret, I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent regarding Kelly Lynch's nude scene in Road House, because Kelly Lynch herself remarked upon it in a 2012 interview with The A.V. Club:

KL: Every time Road House is on and [Bill Murray] or one of his idiot brothers are watching TV—and they're always watching TV—one of them calls my husband and says [adopting reasonable approximation of Carl Spackler], "Kelly's having sex with Patrick Swayze right now. They're doing it. He's throwing her against the rocks." [Away from the receiver.] What? Oh, my God. Mitch was just walking out the door to the set, and he said that Bill once called him from Russia.

AVC: Sorry, not to dwell on this, but you said that Bill Murray "or one of his idiot brothers" will call. Which brothers are we talking about?

KL: All of them! Joel has called; Brian Doyle has called. They will all call! Any and all of them!

End tangent.

In any case, the relabeling project was completed, and all two thousand tapes were sent out on time. Jeff and I became inseparable, bonded by so much more than our stupid Michael Jackson task or our appreciation of Kelly Lynch's nude scene in Road House. So, I will be forever thankful for Jackson's petulance regarding HBO's internal labeling of his concert tape.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Previously mentioned in GTS #186, #220, #324, and #339.

10/3/25

Hello, and welcome to the 345th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I was temping for the architecture firm Perkins&Will (their spacing, not mine) in the Lipstick Building in Manhattan, answering the phone for two architects who didn't get many calls. It was a pretty sweet gig, until one day, at around noon, one of the architects asked me to prepare a slideshow carousel for a presentation he had planned for 1 p.m. that day. This was an actual slide show, with physical slides. (I hadn't heard of a brand-new program called PowerPoint, and apparently, neither had Perkins&Will.)

I went to the conference room to set up the slides.There was a projector and carousel on the conference table, already provided by the facilities team. I had the slides, and the order in which they were supposed to go, so I placed them into their proper slots on the carousel. Then I turned on the projector to do a test run, which is when my troubles began.

The first slide projected onto the screen exactly as expected, but when I hit the "slide advance" button, the second slide shot out of the carousel like a bullet fired from a gun. It ricocheted off the ceiling, and came crashing down to the conference table with a soft plik.

Well, that was certainly unexpected, I thought to myself, as I hit the "slide advance" button again. Same outcome. Another slide came popping up out of the carousel, again bouncing off the ceiling.

This wouldn't do. I tried taking the carousel off and putting it back on again. I tried taking out all the slides and reloading them. No change.

I tracked down the facilities manager to request assistance, and he curtly informed me that the slide projector was operating perfectly, and that I must be loading the slides wrong, and that he certainly didn't have time to show me how to do my job.

Here's the thing: I knew how to operate a slide projector, had done so many times in the past. But he was a manager and I was a temp, so I went back to the conference room to see if there were any other plausible way to load the slides and/or the carousel. There weren't, so I tried a bunch of implausible ways, none of which worked.

I was getting pretty wound up, because the clock on the wall was hurtling towards 1 p.m., but I could think of nothing else to do. So, I went back to the architect to admit my failure, certain he would fire me on the spot.

He didn't fire me. He took the news very much in stride, and told me that he'd just cancel the presentation, adding that he'd had the exact same issue when he tried to load the slide projector earlier that day—information he had not previously disclosed.

The skyrocketing tension I'd been tamping down for the past hour came rushing to the surface, threatening to explode. I closed my eyes, took a breath, opened my eyes again, and told the architect that I needed a minute. Then I took the elevator down to the first floor, stepped out onto Third Avenue, and literally screamed.

When I returned to the office, I asked the architect how he'd like to proceed. He asked me to send an email to the facilities manager (the same facilities manager who'd blown me off) to request repair.

So, that's what I did, cc'ing the architect. The facilities manager promptly got back to me (without cc'ing the architect) with a furious, unhinged reply, denouncing me for sending him "a cover-your-ass email" and for "passive-aggressively accusing [him] of not doing [his] job." There was a lot more. It took him a several paragraphs (though he didn't include any paragraph breaks), as well as a fistful of profanities, for him to get his entire enraged point across.

I didn't know what to do. I had sent him that email at the request of the architect, and the architect expected him to do something about the slide projector. But I was a temp and he was a manager, so how exactly was I supposed to respond?

I'm much older now, and if something like this happened today, I'd forward that email directly to my boss and human resources, demanding a response to this self-evidently unacceptable behavior. What I did instead was to email a conciliatory reply, apologizing for offending him, and letting him know that the request had come directly from the architect. I didn't get a response, and although I worked there for several more months, I never heard another word about it.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/6/25

Hello, and welcome to the 346th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Some years ago, I worked with a guy named Torrey Ham.¹ Torrey had a tiny little work station, which can be seen in the photo above, though it's partially obscured by trees, for reasons I shall now relay.

Once, when no one was watching, as a joke, I moved an artificial tree from somewhere else in the office to a spot right next to Torrey's desk. That worked out pretty well, so the following day, I moved another one. The next day, another one. A day later, another one, and so on. After several days, the joke picked up steam and other people in the office (unknown to me) were also moving trees over to his desk, always when no one else was around.

The reactions around the office were mixed. Most were amused, and Torrey took the whole thing in stride, affably accepting each new addition, but others were oblivious. The entire sales department completely failed to notice, even when Torrey's work station started looking like the set of a Tarzan movie. The sales manager expressed surprise when it was pointed out to him. "When did this happen?" he said, about a week and a half into the prank. And our General Manager never commented on it at all, despite walking by that area every day.

Eventually, a woman in the office, jealous of all of Torrey's trees, pulled one over to her work area (which is not where it had been before; she just liked the look of it). After that, others started taking back trees for their own work areas, which pretty much ended the prank.

Asked about it later, Torrey remarked, "I enjoyed the ambiance," adding: "I will never forget when [our GM] stood for a solid two minutes watching that TV (which was partially obstructed by branches) and then continued on to his office, never saying a word about the trees."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Previously mentioned in GTS #13, #134, and #282.

10/8/25

Hello, and welcome to the 347th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I've only been punched once in my life, but there are things I've said and done that make me surprised the number isn't higher.

There are many examples of those things I've said and done (that might have warranted a punch) right here in these pages. Here's another one:

My girlfriend and I were going to a movie on W 23rd Street in Manhattan. We bought our tickets (very early) at the box office, and then scooted across the street to a just-opened Krispy Kreme to buy a box of doughnuts¹ to sneak into the movie with us.

Inside the Krispy Kreme was chaos. The hot doughnut craze had just begun to sweep New York, and the small shop was completely sardined with two very loosely defined "lines" of people: one waiting to place orders, the other waiting to retrieve orders already placed. It was very difficult to discern which was which, since both lines spaghettied around the shop, criss-crossing each other multiple times, like the world's worst game of Twister crossed with the world's worst conga line. But we managed to sort out where we needed to stand, place our order, and wait in the other sort-of line.

A little while later, I noticed a couple waiting in the "order" line. It became clear through overheard conversation that they'd had the same idea we'd had, and were planning on sneaking a box of doughnuts into the theater. Only they hadn't planned as well in advance as we had, and their movie's start time was inching perilously close. I could see the man becoming more and more agitated, and I could also see that he hadn't quite worked out that there were two lines in play. He kept glaring at the people going up to the counter to retrieve their orders, as if they were cutting the line, and I'm certain that's what he thought they were doing.

We retrieved our order as the couple was placing their order, and the man was practically vibrating with rage. The woman, trying to placate him, said, "Do you want me to go across the street and save seats?" (This was 1996, before there was assigned seating in movie theaters, and by the way, why did that take so long?)

The man glared at her. "I just want to get the fuck out of here," he seethed, low, slow, and intense.

That's when I leaned in close to her, and said (not in a whisper; in a normal tone of voice), "You should hang on to him. He seems like a real catch!"

My girlfriend laughed. I laughed. And the woman laughed loudest of all. Before the man could react, my girlfriend and I made a hasty exit, hoping like hell they weren't going to the same movie. We didn't see them again, so they probably weren't.

Or maybe they simply broke up right then right then and there.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹You may have noticed that I use the spelling "doughnuts" in this secret, but spell it "donuts" in GTS #99 and #332. I assure you, this is not an error. While I prefer the spelling "donuts," here, I'm honoring Krispy Kreme's spelling of its own product.

10/10/25

Hello, and welcome to the 348th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Kate's parents were visiting for the weekend. Now, don't get me wrong: I adore Kate's parents. But they weren't always the... easiest houseguests.

For example (culled from multiple visits):

They didn't like our drinking glasses, so they brought their own, and insisted we keep them in our cupboard for the times they visited, which was twice a year maybe. (I mean, fine, but you can't suck it up for two weekends a year?)
Once, as they were going to bed in our guest room, they noticed that the VCR in their room had started recording, because (as I've mentioned) Kate and I had a robust TV taping schedule. Unsure if it was supposed to be recording, they decided that the best thing they could do would be to unplug the VCR, so that's what they did. This was not a noisy VCR. It just said "REC" on the front, and they thought that was a little fishy. (Bear in mind, Kate and I were still up.)
In the midst of a very hectic day, the day of our second child's birth, with our two-year-old running around the apartment like a maniac, and Kate and I trying to get out the door to go to the hospital, Kate's mother asked me, "Where do you keep your ice?" I looked at her for a full beat, shook my head in disbelief, and for the first time ever, was rude to her: "Where do you think we keep our ice? Just take a wild stab!"
And then there's this, the thing I've wanted to tell you about from the start:

I got up in the morning, that weekend I mentioned up top, and Kate's mom informed me that Shakespeare (our oldest cat) had pooped on the bathroom floor.

"Oh, let me clean that up," I said.

"I took care of it," said Kate's mom. "I picked it up with a spatula I found in that kitchen drawer."

"Ah."

I (privately) informed Kate of this development, and she went straight to her mother to ask where the spatula was now.

"Why?" said Kate's mom.

"Because I want to throw it out."

Kate's mom was very surprised, and assured us that it would be fine if we just ran it through the dishwasher.

Maybe so, but we didn't test that theory. We just threw the spatula away. We're just fussy, I guess, like: Yes, your majesty. Allow me to fetch a spatula that hasn't touched cat poop! La-di-dah!

I tried pointing out to Kate that if this was the way her mother truly felt, then undoubtedly during Kate's childhood, there had to have been instances when-

But she cut me off before I could finish that thought and refused to think about it any more.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/13/25

Hello, and welcome to the 349th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One Columbus Day, many years ago, the entire family got together for a picnic at Greenfield State Park in New Hampshire. Over burgers and hot dogs, we played round after round of Twenty Questions, the game where you think of a famous person, and everybody asks yes/no questions about that person until they get it.

When it was my grandfather's turn to pick a celebrity, we began by asking the standard questions: Is this person male? Is this person alive? Is this person an entertainer? Is this person a politician? etc.

With my grandfather, we eventually, painstakingly determined that his famous person was a male historical military figure who fought in the War of 1812, by which point my grandfather was astonished that we hadn't gotten it yet. "You're going to kick yourselves," he kept assuring us.

After many, many, many more questions (far more than the allotted twenty), we reached an impasse, unable to even think of another question that might help lead us to the right person. "All right," said my grandfather, "I'll give you a hint. Jeez, I hate to do this, because this will really give it away, but this man is famous for sending a message that read, "We have met the enemy and they are ours." He smiled knowingly, secure in the knowledge that now we'd definitely who his person was.

But we were still stumped, every single one of us, which absolutely flabbergasted my grandfather. "You're really going to kick yourselves now," he said.

"Who is it?" we demanded. "We give up!"

My grandfather had look of triumph on his face as, with arms crossed in front of his chest, he proudly proclaimed the name that had stumped us all:

"Oliver Hazard Perry."

The family fell into silence, such as the silence that must exist on the barren wasteland of the moon, until my uncle David shattered it with a loud, confounded "Who?" which was followed by a chorus of "Who?"s and laughter from all of us.

This became known as the Oliver Hazard Perry incident, and we lovingly (though only occasionally) teased my grandfather about it for the next four decades, even though what we were really doing was celebrating our own ignorance of American military history.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/15/25

Hello, and welcome to the 350th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Kate and I were talking about the inevitable cultural acceptance of polyamorous relationships and marriages—which, yes, is exactly what the anti-gay-marriage crowd trotted out in all their "slippery slope" arguments back in the day. (Oh well. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.)

I pointed out that eventually, a two-income household was not going to be sustainable. Salaries just aren't keeping pace with the rising cost of food and shelter.

"Oh yeah," Kate agreed. "Can you imagine if, when we were starting out, we had two extra men pitching in?"

"Wait," I said. "Two extra men?"

"Yes," said Kate firmly.

"Two extra men besides me, you mean."

"Right."

"Not one man and one woman?"

"No," said Kate.

"Two women?" I asked, even though I already knew the answer to that one.

"No, that wouldn't be for me," said Kate.

"Interesting."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/17/25

Hello, and welcome to the 351st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In May 2025, the first Stephen King Day was held in Hallowell, Maine. There was a ton of Stephen King-related material on hand, obviously, as well as books being sold by other, far-less-famous horror writers who also reside in Maine. My dear friend Barry Dodd and I were there hawking our Night Is Falling graphic novel series, and I had a little side-hustle going, selling copies of my pulp sci-fi novel, Dr. Xivray and the Presidential Peril.

It's always awkward, pitching your work to random people walking past who are trying desperately to avoid eye contact. Barry and I held off on the hard sell, unless someone lingered at our table, pausing to examine the books or the artwork of our magnificent artist, Alysa Avery. Whenever that happened, one of us would cheerfully launch into our introductory spiel:

"If you want the pitch, we'll be happy to provide it. If you'd prefer to browse in silence, we'll hang back. But you should know, if you linger for more than a minute, we're going to start talking to you."

Our Night Is Falling pitch (if requested):

An ongoing graphic novel set in the summer of ‘77, in a small town in Maine called Jonah’s Harbor (based loosely on Bucksport). A group of misfit teens has discovered that there's a vampire in town, and they team up to take it down. It's Scooby-Doo meets Salem's Lot!

My Xivray pitch (if requested):

A pastiche novel of old-fashioned pulp adventures, updated for the 21st century to include nods to feminism, cyberpunk, same-sex romance, artificial intelligence, and reflections on what it means to be human. It's also funny! It's Douglas Adams meets Ex Machina by way of The West Wing!

If people declined our pitches but lingered for more than a minute, we'd engage them in conversation about their lives and their interests, and we'd talk to them about our projects in relation to whatever they told us. We met a lot of fun, terrific people that way.

One woman, who was there with her daughter, told us that her son had been a big fan of Stephen King, but he had died almost exactly a year earlier.

"Oh, jeez," said Barry. "I'm sorry about that. Uh, let's talk about something else."

Well, that seemed a little insufficient to me, which sounds like I'm calling Barry out, but I'm really not. It's impossible to know what to say when a stranger shares something so painful, but I felt strongly that more of a response was needed here, so I interjected, "I'm so sorry that happened. Grief is a heavy stone we carry for the rest of our lives."

I have no idea where that came from, had no idea I was going to say it until it was coming out of my mouth, but as soon as I said it, I worried that I sounded like pretentious asshole. Thankfully, the woman nodded solemnly and thanked me for my words.

Still, when she moved on, I asked Barry if I had come across as a pretentious asshole. Barry assured me that I had not, and so did the inadvertent eavesdropper at the adjacent table (Maine author Samantha Eaton), and, despite my self-doubt, I decided to trust them.

Still, if you disagree with them, or think they were lying, and you think I was (or am) a pretentious asshole, please, for the love of god, please consider telling me, and then don't.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/20/25

Hello, and welcome to the 352nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I have no memories of learning how to read—I mean the actual processes of figuring out what each of those little symbols meant, and how to put them together into words.

I have very clear memories of not knowing how to read, and very clear memories of just after having learned how to read, but zero memories of what came in-between.

Some memories of not knowing how to read:

Listening and following along to tapes my dad had made of him reading kids' picture books. (He rang a little bell when it was time for me to turn the page.)

I loved those tapes when I was a kid, but now it makes me think of all the times my dad was absent.

Looking at all those strange, squiggly shapes beneath the pictures, trying to comprehend how they could possibly hold so much meaning within them. It seemed like it must be magic.
Making my mom read Uncle Wiggily and the Peppermint aloud to me every single night before bed, because it was the longest story we had.

Before too long, I had Uncle Wiggily memorized word-for-word, so even though I couldn't read, I knew if my mom tried to skip any part of it.

Gathering up all my books and plopping them down in front of my dad while we were on vacation on Cape Cod, demanding that he teach me how to read.

I remember the excruciatingly frustrating first few minutes of that teaching attempt, but have no memory of what happened after those first few minutes.

Memories of just after learning how to read:

Being super-bored by the Dick and Jane primers (man, did anybody like those?), but excited I could read them on my own.
Reading Charlotte's Web at five because my mom decided I was a good enough reader to tackle it.
Realizing that I could write my own story.

I wish I could remember the in-between part. I wish I could remember what that was like. So it was fascinating to me to watch my older child go through the learning-to-read process when he was five years old, watching him figure out how to sound things out, or tease out spellings (or approximations thereof) from the sounds of the words.

At the time, he was obsessed with everything Star Wars. Despite not having seen a single one of the movies, TV shows, or any other ancillary media, he knew, through a kind of pop-cultural osmosis, all the movie titles, all the characters, and all the associated props and accoutrements. He drew the Star Wars posters below, making his best guess at how to spell the titles.

Those guesses were pretty far off, and the drawings were made by a five-year-old, so I've provided translations of the words and the pictures. Still, for the most part, I understand how he arrived at those spellings, even when he was way off. This was literacy in its embryonic stage, and it was fascinating.

At least to me.

Star Wars (that's a light saber floating above the ground)

A New Hope (I think that's C3PO)

The Empire Strikes Back (a light saber and I don't know what)

Attack of the Clones (Darth Vader, holding a light saber)

Star Wars / The Clone Wars / The Empire Strikes Back (no idea on the picture, but that might be R2D2 on the right)

Next time, we'll talk about a devastating milestone in the kid's Star Wars fandom that occurred just a year later.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/22/25

Hello, and welcome to the 353rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I picked up my older child at school. He was six. As soon as he saw me, he said, all in one breath, "Daddy, someone told me that Anakin turns into Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker is his son and Luke takes Darth Vader's helmet off and Darth Vader dies and is that true that Anakin turns into Darth Vader?"

Damn it!

I mean, I'd always known it was a serious long shot that he'd remain unspoiled for that one, but I'd still been holding out hope. As established two days ago, he was already a big Star Wars fan, and by this point, he'd seen his first-ever Star Wars media: the first season of The Clone Wars animated series, which positioned Anakin as its hero. So, I knew this revelation would be a devastating blow.

I'd planned to introduce him to the movie franchise in release order, because while "I am your father" is a gut punch, it's decidedly less so if it's diluted with four movies of foreknowledge:

"No! That's not true! That's impossible!"

Yeah, Luke. It's possible. And we've all know forever, so way to finally catch up with the rest of us.

Knowing the twist ruins the twist. That's the burden carried by all Star Wars fans younger than Generation X.

Anyway, I tried to wriggle out of it by saying, "We'll just have to watch the movies and find out," but the kid wasn't having it: "Daddy, you've seen the movies," he said. "You know whether or not Anakin turns into Darth Vader. So can you just tell me?"

So, I did. (Really, I'd rather he'd come to me with the Santa Claus question.)

Oh well, I thought. At least he doesn't know what Rosebud is.¹

When he finally and "officially" witnessed Anakin's heel turn for himself, two years later, this is what happened.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Today, at age 22, he absolutely knows what Rosebud is, but he still hasn't seen Citizen Kane.

10/24/25

Hello, and welcome to the 354th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

On May 25, 1983, I was driving with my mom from our tiny little town of Wilsall, Montana (pop. 237) to the bustling metropolis of Bozeman (pop. 57,000). As we got into town, we passed a movie theater, with a line of hundreds of people wrapped around the building.

I knew instantly what this was. There was no internet back then, and we only got three TV stations (two of them pretty badly). I didn't subscribe to any of the newsletters or fan magazines, so it's not like I was seeped in media anticipation, but I understood at once that this was the next Star Wars movie. No other franchise drew that kind of crowd to movie theaters. This was the premiere of Return of the Jedi, the final film in the original trilogy (not that we called it the original trilogy back then).

I was thirteen years old. Star Wars was still a pretty big deal in my life. I started to, simultaneously,

freak out

and

try to remain cool in front of my mom.

"Um, I might want to see that," I said, sounding far more casual than I felt.

"Oh, Greg," said my mom. "That line is two hours long at least, and we have so many errands to run."

"You could drop me off," I suggested.

[long pause]

"All right."

I don't know what the plan was, if the show was sold out by the time I got up to the counter. We didn't have cell phones, so I guess I would have just hung out in the lobby for three hours. We didn't even talk about that possibility, as far as I can remember. She just dropped me off and drove away, and I got in line.

In line, I kind of glommed on to the family in front of me, who happily adopted me into their circle. And yes, the line was about two hours long. But I got a ticket no problem and bought a Coke the size of my head. (Well, in my memory, it was the size of my head, but size standards have changed so much in this country, today, it would probably be considered a small.)

The movie started and I began experiencing unprecedented levels of euphoria. This was it. The third and final installment in the Star Wars trilogy. Wooo! Boba Fett! Holy cow! The barge escape! Damn!

Then, somewhere in the second hour, that head-sized Coke started catching up with me, and I realized that I really had to go to the bathroom—like, a lot—and I really didn't want to miss anything.

But as the reality of the Ewoks began to sink in (it was supposed to have been a planet of Wookiees, damn it!), not to mention the reality of my bladder, it gradually became less and less urgent that I not miss a minute.

So, I went to the bathroom.

(But I hurried.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

Illustration by Alysa Avery¹

10/27/25

Hello, and welcome to the 355th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Although I have previously asserted that I have no wish to turn the GTS series into a compendium of grudges, I have, I'll admit, occasionally indulged in a declaration of grievance over some past injustice. With today's secret, I will once again... indulge.

Let's talk about the cartoons in The New Yorker. Much has been written about the blandness, elitism, and privileged cultural hegemony of New Yorker cartoons, but most of this analysis boils down to one thing:

They're not funny.

This may be unfair, and it certainly wasn't always true of the magazine that brought us Charles Addams, Roz Chast, and Saul Steinberg. But it's become difficult to ignore the smug impenetrability of the modern-day New Yorker cartoon. Heck, Seinfeld devoted a a whole episode to this back in 1998.

Which brings us to the source of today's injury: The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, which is a last-page feature depicting a captionless cartoon by one of The New Yorker's regular cartoonists. Readers are invited to submit their own captions, with the "top three" chosen by the editors, and the ultimate winner determined by reader vote.

I put "top three" in quotes because the quality of the finalists is often just... subpar.²

I myself have entered the caption contest a couple of times, but have never been selected. This will sound kind of conceited (because it is), but I honestly believe that my entries were far superior to any of the chosen finalists. (Man, reading that last sentence over, it's even more conceited than I feared.)

But here, see for yourself:

This cartoon was drawn by the great Gahan Wilson in 2007. The three finalists were:

"Have you considered writing this story in the third monkey rather than the first monkey?"
"We'll have to run it by our infinite number of editors."
"Sorry, guys. It's another rejection letter."

And those are fine, I guess, but here was my (unselected) entry:

"Very close. But I'm afraid you misspelled Coriolanus."³

You be the judge, but I think I was robbed.

To be fair to the Caption Contest entrants, the artists behind the captionless cartoons are deliberately crafting odd or incongruous images with no obvious textual punchline. (As blogger Charles Lavoie once asserted, "Christ, what an asshole!" works as an answer to every New Yorker Magazine Caption Contest.")

Still, given the nature of the exercise, serving up incongruous images make sense, but these images stand in stark contrast to the magazine's regular cartoons, which typically feature such mundane subjects as office workers, people walking down the sidewalk, and housepets.

Here's another caption contest example, from 2021, by artist Lonnie Millsap:

The three finalists for this one were:

"We should've ordered our drinks straight up."
"They forgot the little umbrellas."
"These drinks go right to my head."

I wouldn't go far as to call these "fine." Generously, they might be described as "nonsensical." Ungenerously, they might be described as "shitty."

Here was my submission:

"When you said revolving restaurant, I was picturing something different."

I mean, I think we can all agree (can't we?) that my caption is far better than any of the finalists.

So, that's my grievance for today. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Let's give it up for Night Is Falling artist Alysa Avery, who drew today's header image. Alysa does so much amazing work, including some truly stunning tattoos. Check out her website!

²Wildly off-topic, but whenever I call something "subpar," I'm thinking of Nicolas Cage in The Family Man, a movie I've never actually seen, but somewhere, somehow, I encountered this particular line reading, and it just stuck with me.

³This caption arose out of something I once said in college: "If an infinite number of monkeys were typing on an infinite number of typewriters, one would eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare, but another one would produce the complete works of William Shakespeare and misspell Macbeth." This inspired my roommate, Matt Warren, to title his next mix tape, Macbesh (which I still find hilarious). When submitting my caption entry to The New Yorker, I just thought Coriolanus was funnier. I can't remember why.

10/29/25

Hello, and welcome to the 356th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I will never not love seeing dogs sticking their heads out of car windows. It's always charming, and the joy on their faces is infectious. I like to imagine the first time the dog stuck its head out a car window, and the joy it must have felt at this discovery!

Once, when my older child was four, we saw a great big dog in the driver's seat of a car, its paw hanging loosely out the window, the human driver completely obscured by the dog's girth, and it looked exactly like the dog was the one driving.

"Look!" I said to my son, "There's a dog driving that car!"

He laughed in delight, and to this day, we both swear we once saw a dog driving a car.

And another incident I witnessed was even more beguiling:

I saw a car moving very slowly past our house, with—no kidding—twenty dogs inside, their heads all sticking out various windows. There were absolutely no humans visible, and it looked for all the world like they were in the midst of a daring getaway from the pound. It was impossible (for me) not to imagine the head dog driving and telling all its passengers, "Everybody be cool! This is gonna work. Just be cool!"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

10/31/25

Hello, and welcome to the 357th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In GTS #231, I shared with you an image of an elaborate werewolf costume I had made for myself in 2008, a costume that took me weeks to construct. Today, I'm sharing an image of another werewolf costume I made for myself, eighteen years earlier, which took me an afternoon to construct. I'll tell you about it.

Senior year in college, in preparation of the campus Halloween party (DJ'ed by my pals Chad and Andy), I took a trip down to the Ben Franklin five-and-dime store in town.

Aside: I looked up the Ben Franklin five-and-dime chain on Wikipedia, just to see if it was still in business, and the Wikipedia entry has a picture of the very same Ben Franklin store I went to that day in 1990, in Middlebury, Vermont. Coincidentally, this picture was taken in 2008, the same year I made that elaborate werewolf costume referenced above, but that Ben Franklin store looks exactly the same in this 2008 photo as it did when I went there in 1990. Exactly the same. (Sadly, the Middlebury location closed in 2018, a year after the entire Ben Franklin franchise filed for bankruptcy.) End aside.

As I perused the cheap costume offerings Ben Franklin had for sale, I didn't really have an idea in mind. I settled on some brown makeup, a set of plastic fangs, a two-tone "hippie wig," and a tube of something called "body glue." I took everything back to my dorm room, where I applied the brown makeup, then cut off most of the wig hair into a bowl, and glued it, strand by strand, to my face (plus a couple of still-intact wig pieces for the sides). Here's a closer look, without the sunglasses, where you can more clearly see the individual hairs and the edges of the wig fragments.

I finished this laborious process just in time for dinner, which I had to go to in costume, of course. I got a ton of double-takes and curious looks from the dining hall staff and other students as I ate my meal.¹

The party itself was a blast—so much better than the same party had gone for me the previous year, when I had gotten violently ill as a result of consuming far too much cheap vodka beforehand.² Chad and Andy served up some awesome music, I got a ton of compliments on my costume, and I didn't throw up once!

Over the course of the night, it got so hot on the dance floor, the glue on my face began to melt, and the werewolf hair started falling away in clumps. By the end of the evening, I looked very odd indeed, and the dance floor was littered with my departed tresses. (Apologies to the Middlebury College Chateau cleaning crew, 35 years too late.)

As a happy epilogue, campus security came in to break up the party at 1 a.m., as required by college policy, but Chad and Andy argued that we were going off Daylight Saving Time that night, and turning all the clocks back an hour, so it was really only midnight. Miraculously, campus security bought that argument, and the party lasted another whole hour.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹As I recall, I got a big dish of beef chow mein.

²See GTS #27.

11/3/25

Hello, and welcome to the 358th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank—the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable.

-Lewis Carroll, "A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale," Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illustration by John Tenniel

On February 10, 2008, in the middle of a wild snowstorm, Kate and I bundled up the kids (aged 2 and 4) and, not quite sure what to expect, headed to our first-ever election caucus—this one for the 2008 Democratic Presidential primary, in which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were matched up head-to-head.

We waited in the jam-packed Auburn (Maine) Middle School cafeteria for what seemed like hours (because it was) while the town clerk registered brand-new Democrats, and the party chair went over various procedures and regulations. The kids were remarkably well behaved during all of this, but they were getting damned antsy towards the end of hour three.

Then it was just about time to break up into our separate wards to get our caucus on.

Except first, anyone who wanted to could get up and speak on behalf of his or her candidate. A lot of people wanted to—a lot more than anybody had patience for. I'm all for everybody having a voice, but these people reminded me of the kid who had just one more question as the professor was getting ready to dismiss class.

When we finally did get to break up into wards, our ward was assigned the gym—thank god, as it gave the kids some much-needed running around space. Meanwhile, the grown-ups counted off old-school to get a head count. Then the Obama folks lined up on one side of the gym, the Clinton folks on the other, with undecideds (and one lonely Dennis Kucinich supporter) clustered in the center circle.

First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, ('the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no 'One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out 'The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, 'But who has won?'

-Lewis Carroll, "A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale," Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illustration by Charles Robinson

The Obamas and the Clintons counted off old-school again (Obamas led the Clintons by about 20). Our ward had 11 delegates to send, which would be assigned proportionally. Our job now was to convince the undecideds. Various people came forward to speak directly to the knot of folks in the middle, making their case for either Clinton or Obama. This was the coolest part, watching the undecideds make up their minds in real time as they peeled off one by one to go to one side of the gym or the other. Even that one lonely Dennis Kucinich supporter eventually caved (for Clinton).

When everyone had chosen a side, the people in charge broke out pencil and paper to do the math: For our 11 delegates, six would go for Obama, five for Clinton.

I have to say that as big a pain in the ass as this process was, the sheer physicality of the head count really made me feel like my vote mattered. And the impassioned arguments on both sides made the whole thing feel much more like a democratic process rather than a private individual transaction.

That said, we definitely voted absentee after that, and in 2020, Maine switched the state's nominating process from a caucus to a primary.

Remember to vote tomorrow!

Off-year elections are so important. And if you're in Maine, please vote "No" on Question 1. Supposedly designed to cut down on voter fraud (a vanishingly small problem), Question 1 was really designed to curtail voter participation, a goal that should be condemned by all.

Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could.

-Lewis Carroll, "A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale," Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illustration by John Tenniel

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/5/25

Hello, and welcome to the 359th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

There's a running joke in my family (and by "running joke," I mean a joke that only I make, and long ago ran into the ground). The joke is, I'll make up a ridiculous portmanteau, and try to pass it off as a common expression.

Examples:

My wife: "Put that on the white bookcase."
Me: "Or 'wookcase,' as that's known."
My older child: "That's not how it's known."
Me: "I'm pretty sure it is."

My wife: "I'm going to take a quick nap."
Me: "Or 'quap,' as that's known."
My wife: "I hate that one!"
Me: "Enjoy your quap."

Older child: "I want the buffalo chicken wings!"
Me: "Or 'bchwings,' as they're known."
Younger child: "No, they're not!"
Me: "Go ahead and order some bchwings. They'll know exactly what you're talking about!"

Older child (describing a kids' spy show he really likes): "There's a twist in every mission."
Me: "Or a 'twission,' as that's known."
Younger child (making me so proud): "And if you save up enough of it, you can go to college!"

One time, my son discovered that his jacket pocket was just a stitched-on pocket flap. "That's a mock-pocket," I told him. "Also known as a mocket."

"Is that really what it's called?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said (because that one's actually true). "It's a pretty good... uh... I can't think of the word."

"Portmanteau?" said my son, and I feel like my work is done here.

(Which doesn't mean I'm going to stop making that joke.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/7/25

Hello, and welcome to the 360th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

A woman stopped me in the library. I had never seen her before. "You look like a young Forest Clark," she told me.

(This was thirteen years ago. Maybe now, I look like an old Forest Clark.)

"Okay," I said, because if somebody tells you you look like a young Forest Clark, and you have no idea who Forest Clark is, and you don't feel like asking who Forest Clark is, "Okay" is just about the only thing you can say.

"Do you know who Forest Clark is?" she said, apparently unwilling to let me off the hook that easily.

"No," I said. "Is he an actor?"

"No," she replied. "He's a veterinarian."

I could think of nothing to say to that, so that's what I said.

Twelve years later, I was astonished to learn that our new veterinarian practice was owned by Forest Clark himelf. I told the receptionist about this long-ago incident. She kind of squinted at me, and said, "Yeah, I can see it."

How about you? Can you see it?

This is Forest Clark, circa 2020:

Confidential to Dr. Clark: If you're reading this because someone directed you here, or because you Googled your own name, please say hello in the comments below, and weigh in on this important matter: Do you think I look like you? (Also, if you'd like me to take your picture down, I totally will.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/10/25

Hello, and welcome to the 361st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

The elevator doors opened. The couple standing next to me—a man and a woman, strangers to me—both took two giant steps back, as if they expected zombies to come boiling out,¹ but the elevator was empty.

We stepped in, and the elevator doors closed with a pneumatic glump. The man and the woman were both staring directly at me. After a beat, the man said, "Are you into zombie apocalypses?" This is how he chose to start a conversation with me.

"Sure," I said, because what else are you supposed to say to a stranger on the elevator who asks you if you're into zombie apocalypses? Besides, I watched The Walking Dead, so I figured that counted.

"We've got a whole stockpile of weapons in our basement," he said. "You know, just in case." That's when I realized that he hadn't been talking about watching The Walking Dead on TV.

"Are you really into zombie apocalypses," asked the woman, "or are you just saying that?"

"Why would I just say that?" I answered (sort of).

"To make fun," said the man, his face turning grave.

"I'm not making fun, I assure you," I told him, which seemed to satisfy them both. And anyway, it was their stop.

It was not my stop, and even if it had been my stop, it would not have been my stop that time, because sometimes, you just have to move on and leave your worries² behind.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹This impression was informed by future events.

²And by "worries," I obviously mean your zombie apocalypse-obsessed elevator-mates.

11/12/25

Hello, and welcome to the 362nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was ten years old, my mother read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I've never read it myself, but I'll never forget a small detail from the novel that she shared with me. The narrator discusses his habit of endlessly procrastinating on small household tasks that could be easily and quickly accomplished if he actually focused his attention on them. So, he might have a dripping faucet for months, when all he'd have to do to fix it would be to install a 10-cent washer.

Since then, the book's title has served as (admittedly somewhat cumbersome) shorthand between us: "Why haven't you fixed this loose doorknob?" "I don't know. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." "Still haven't replaced the battery in that clock?" "Yeah. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."

Kate and I always, always, always have a ton of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tasks around the house (doesn't everybody?). For example:

Our shower pressure had been getting weaker and weaker, until we really couldn't call it a shower anymore; it was more like a trickling drip contraption, with a drain. Our sister-in-law suggested we soak our shower head in vinegar. So we tried that, which resulted in a mild improvement in water pressure for about one day. Super.

So, one Sunday, I went ahead and bought a new shower head and installed it. The difference was stunning. When something in your environment gets slowly and steadily worse, you get used to it slowly and steadily, as it's happening, until you're a frog boiling under an irregularly dribbling spigot.

The new shower head was a beauty, delivering what may be the strongest stream we'd ever had, anyplace we'd ever lived. Kate and I each took 20-minute showers, reveling in the water's newfound brawn.

It was so monumentally easy (and so enormously satisfying) to fix this problem, it invites the question: Why don't I tackle more of these small home repairs more often?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/14/25

Hello, and welcome to the 363rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My wife was looking for her phone, so I said, "Siri, call my wife."

"Which one?" said Siri—meaning my wife's cellphone or my wife's workphone.

But try telling my wife that.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/17/25

Hello, and welcome to the 364th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When they were little (say, around 7 and 5), my kids liked to tell jokes. The older one ("Otter") would read directly from joke books, rattling off the jokes contained therein in rapid-fire succession, usually at the dinner table.

The younger one ("Flapjack") had no patience for the formal structure of prefab jokes, preferring instead to riff on jokes that had just been told. For example:

My friend Julia's favorite joke is: "What did the zero say to the eight? Nice belt!" Upon hearing that one, Flapjack motormouthed: "What did the zero say to the nine? Nice tail! What did the nine say to the six? Get off your head! What did the one say to the zero? You've got nothing!"

One night at the dinner table, Otter asked Flapjack (reading from the joke book), "Why did the boy eat his homework?"

For the record, the official joke book-sanctioned punchline was: "Because his teacher told him it was a piece of cake." But Flapjack wasn't interested in the official joke book-sanctioned punchline, instead serving up: "So his dog wouldn't eat it."

Which, in my opinion, is much better.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/19/25

Hello, and welcome to the 365th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

At a party in the early '90s, co-hostess Jen Hart, Chad Anderson, and I decided to raid the other co-hostess's¹ wardrobe for hats, jacket, and jewelry, donning them without hesitation or permission, and posing for the photo above.

I absolutely love this picture of us, even though—or maybe because—I'm (deliberately) standing too close to the camera to be in focus. To me, we look like a short-lived '80s British pop band that maybe had one hit on the Pretty In Pink soundtrack. This would have been our one album cover, had we been that imaginary '80s British pop band. But we weren't. We were just a couple of party guests (and a co-hostess) having some fun with someone else's hats, which, at the time, was enough for us.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹The other co-hostess was Katherine Stebbins.

11/21/25

Hello, and welcome to the 366th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Of all the verbal exchanges I've had with my children, I think I might be proudest of this one:

My kids were talking in the car (to each other, not to me) about the video game Baldur's Gate 3.

Older Child: "What's the name of that [female] character?"

Me (interjecting aggressively and enthusiastically, despite having never played the game): "Janice?"

Older Child: "No."

Me (rapid-fire): "Janet?"

Older Child: "No."

Me (rapid-fire): "Janette?"

Older Child: "It doesn't start with a J."

Me (rapid-fire): "Barbara?"

Older Child: "It's a fantasy name."

Me (rapid-fire): "Barbara Baggins?"

Older Child: "Please stop guessing."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/24/25

Hello, and welcome to the 367th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When my kids were tiny, tiny babies, they had a plush "bedtime bunny" that, to any right-thinking, upstanding citizen, was clearly supposed to be a sleepy bunny decked out in striped pajamas.

However, to a sleep-deprived new dad, this creature looked for all the world like a very stoned rabbit dressed in a prison uniform. Thus was born Bad Influence Bunny (BIB for short), who would say things to the kids in a slow, baked, Matthew McConaugheyesque drawl—things like:

Hey, kid, do you realize how much fun it can be to throw a lit match into a car driving by?

or:

Have you ever tried to pee on something that's alive?

or:

Remember: if you see a thing in a store you really like, and it can fit under your shirt without anybody noticing, that thing is yours to keep.

or:

If you tape a piece of stinky cheese to the back of a picture hanging in somebody's house, they may smell it, but they'll never find it.

This routine made each of my kids laugh and laugh and laugh, even before he knew the meaning of words, partly due to the funny voice I was using, and partly due to their mother's laughter at my mischievous monkeyshines.¹

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Or should that be bunnyshines?

11/26/25

Hello, and welcome to the 368th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

"Do you know what the name of that place is?" I said to my four-year-old as we drove past a familiar storefront one sunny day, eighteen years ago.

"I forget," he said.

"Lake Street Variety."

"Do they sell lakes?" he asked

"No," I said wistfully, briefly savoring the idea of a store that sold lakes—not a store with catalogs or pictures of lakes, but a store you could go into and actually pick out a lake to buy and take it home with you. (Yes, there'd be some physical and/or pan-dimensional issues to resolve, but I'm sure they could sort that out.)

"Why is it called Lake Street Varieby?" he demanded.

"It's 'Variety,'" I said. "Because it's a variety store, and 'Lake Street' because it's on Lake Street." (Real-life is always so much more mundane than kid speculation.)

"What's 'varieby' mean?"

"It's 'variety," I said. "And it just means a lot of different stuff. So a variety store sells a lot of different stuff."

"We have lots of different stuff," said my son, vastly under-representing the sheer volume of clutter overwhelming our house and our lives. "That must mean we have a variety."

"Yes," I said, "we certainly do."

I'm not sure why I didn't include this conversation in the Actual Conversations With My Kids project, but I'm happy I can share it with you now.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

11/28/25

Hello, and welcome to the 369th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My girlfriend was friends with a woman who was marrying Woody Allen's nephew, and we were invited to the wedding. This was a few years after Woody Allen had left Mia Farrow for Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow's adopted daughter, and shortly before Allen and Previn officially tied the knot themselves. Woody and Soon-Yi were going to be at the wedding, and I think there was some talk of my girlfriend's friend arranging for them to be seated at our table.

However, a few days before the wedding, Woody Allen's nephew informed his fiancée that he was not 100% convinced he could remain faithful to her, which, after further investigation, was revealed to be a backdoor way of acknowledging that he'd already been unfaithful to her, so the wedding was abruptly canceled.

So, the no-longer-bride-to-be clearly dodged a bullet, and in retrospect, so did my girlfriend and I.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/1/25

Hello, and welcome to the 370th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My freshman year roommate (Chris) didn't like me very much at first, but I grew on him once he discovered my rascal side.

One night, a guy on our hall, Leland (whose roommate had dropped out after one week, leaving him with a single), was playing video games in a room down the hall. His dorm room door was open, so while he was occupied, Chris and I:

removed everything¹ from his room except the posters on the wall,
hid it all in the kitchenette,
locked the kitchenette,
went back to our room,
locked our door,
turned off our light, and
went to bed.

An hour or so later, lying in the dark, we heard Leland return to his completely empty room. We stifled our laughter as Leland freaked out, running up and down the hall, accusing many people who were not us: "Where's Dan? I haven't seen Dan all night!"; "Did you do this, Will?"; "I bet it was Barney! Who's seen Barney?"

Finally, inevitably, there was a knock on our door. Feigning sleepiness, I got out of bed, and opened the door without turning on the light. Leland barged in, and I crawled back into bed. He stood between our beds, silently evaluating both of us, the overhead light still off, but light from the courtyard spilling in through window.

"Do you guys know anything about what happened to my room?"

"What happened to your room?" I asked, faux-groggily.

Leland eyed us for a beat. "When did you guys go to bed?"

"Coupla hours ago," said Chris, not quite as convincingly as I would have liked.

"And you didn't see anything, didn't hear anything, or know anything about it?" said Leland.

"I still don't know anything about it," I said. "What are you talking about?"

"Somebody took everything out of my room."

"Holy shit!" I said. "By everything, you mean-"

"Yeah, everything. There's nothing left but the posters on the wall."

"That's cold," I said. "You need some help rounding up suspects?"

"Nah," said Leland. "If you guys didn't have anything to do with it, I'll let you get back to sleep."

"Okay," I said, closing my eyes.

"Just one thing," said Leland, reminding me very much of Columbo.

I opened my eyes again. "What?"

"Can Chris stop smiling?"

I looked over at Chris, who had a grin on his face as big as a slice of cantaloupe. "No!" he exploded, rupturing with delighted, uncontrollable laughter.

The jig was up, so we both got out of bed and helped Leland put everything back in his room just the way it was. It took a hour or more, but it was worth it.

I could be such a rascal, couldn't I?²

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹By "everything," I do mean everything: His bed, his desk, his chair, his computer, his dresser, his clothes, his stereo, his CDs, and on and on. Everything.

²"Rascal" might be too kind a word here. As I've asserted many times, all of my college stories, like every New Yorker cartoon, could all be plausibly captioned, "Christ, what an asshole."

12/3/25

Hello, and welcome to the 371st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I would never voluntarily watch a sporting event on my own. This is not an indictment of sports enthusiasts; I just don't have the interest. It wasn't an active choice not to be interested in sports. I simply find that I am not. Forcing myself to love a sport or a team or an athlete would be like forcing myself to fall in love with a stranger. It won't work.

However, I can enjoy sports, even get riled up about a game, when watching with somebody who is a sports fan. I can draft off their enthusiasm and find myself invested in the competition. I have fond memories of watching the Celtics with my family, attending Red Sox games with my dad, going to Yankees games with my friends, rooting for all the teams in question, and loving it. "How can you root for the Red Sox and the Yankees?" you may be asking. "That's just not possible." Except it is, if you honestly and truly don't give a hoot about sports, but can take genuine pleasure in being in the presence of a loved ones' joy over sports.

Once, my dad's friend Claude¹ was visiting. Claude's a big Chicago Bulls fan, and we sat down to watch a Bulls game on TV, despite the fact that Claude claimed at the outset that whenever he watched a Bulls game, they lost, but if he didn't watch, they won.

I gave him a bit of a hard time about that assertion. "You're saying that you're so central to the order of the universe," I asked him, "that your actions have a direct effect on events that have nothing to do with you happening a thousand miles away?"

"Yes, I'm that important," said Claude, in all sincerity.

"Okay," I said, with all the sarcasm I could muster (which, in my early 20s, was quite a lot of sarcasm).

Well, the Bulls started the game very badly, making stupid mistakes and trailing by more than twenty points at the end of the first quarter. Claude got up and left the room in disgust, and my dad followed. I stayed behind to watch the rest of the game.

That might seem surprising, me staying to watch by myself, given what I just reported about myself, but remember: I cannot resist the allure of the narrative, the pull of "what happens next?" Claude had created a narrative wherein his actions had a direct effect on the performance of the Chicago Bulls. I had to see how that played out, and it was going to be a much better story if the Bulls actually won.²

As soon as Claude and my dad left the room, and I'm talking a matter of seconds, the Bulls' play improved dramatically. They were quicker on their feet, more nimble with the ball, faster, sharper, smarter. The other team was still playing very well, but little by little, that twentysomething-point margin began to erode.

With twenty seconds left in the game, the Bulls were up by one point, but the other team had the ball. That's when my dad and Claude decided to come back to see how the game had turned out.

"Get out of here!" I shouted at Claude, now fully on board with his theory.

Obligingly, Claude opened the sliding door, stepped out onto the lawn, and shut his eyes. The twenty seconds ticked by, and the other team failed to score. The Bulls had won.

Now, an anecdotal account of one event does not constitute proof, but I firmly believe that if Claude had stayed in the room and watched the final twenty seconds, the Bulls would have lost.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Last seen in GTS #305. That's him on the right, in the header image above, and my dad on the left.

²You'll note that I'm not enough of a sports fan to remember who the Bulls were playing, or the names of any of the players on either team.

12/5/25

Hello, and welcome to the 372nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In college, I volunteered to read to a local blind woman named Lynette Denney. Lynette had been a painter, but had lost her eyesight to diabetic retinopathy fifteen years earlier, so had changed her medium to sculpture. Her house was filled with her work, all in various stages of completion, much of it quite beautiful.

This is Lynette's first sculpture after she lost her sight, "Standing Woman."

click to enlarge

Here's more of her work.¹

click to enlarge

Below is my favorite piece of hers, from two slightly different angles, a figure of a woman, her hair flowing behind her, raising her leg to stomp her foot. This was on a table right next to where I sat when I was at Lynette's house. She told me that she felt like that sometimes, wanting to stomp her foot in rage at the world.

click to enlarge

For my volunteer work, I read correspondence and news to Lynette, and helped her to pay her own bills. She had a cardboard template she put over her checks, so she would know where to write, and I would feed her the names and amounts due.

Lynette had a guide dog, Flory, a yellow Lab who was just about the sweetest animal I'd ever seen. Lynette advised me not to pet or interact with Flory, as she was a service animal at work, which I know is pretty common guidance. The dog was clearly starved for affection though, because whenever I read to Lynette, Flory would rest her head on my lap, and look up at me with sad, lonely eyes. It was sometimes more than I could resist, and I would (very, very quietly) place my hand on her head, and gently pet her or scratch her behind her ears. It wasn't very often, but sometimes, I just couldn't help myself, and blind Lynette was none the wiser.

You may think me quite the bounder, taking advantage of Lynette's disability to break her guide dog rules, but oh, if you could have seen that dog's precious, yearning face!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹All photos screengrabbed from a 1991 episode of Crossroads, a PBS show that ran from 1981 to 1994 and profiled interesting Vermont citizens, businesses, and events. I also found a 1994 L.A. Times article about Denney, and an awkwardly truncated obituary from 2004, but I can find no other references to or images of her work, or any indication of what became of it.

12/8/25

Hello, and welcome to the 373rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In college, I never, ever, not once, started a paper before the night before it was due. This is not a boast. It's a statement of fact that reflects a very real problem I have with procrastination.

It didn't matter if it was a two-page response paper or a twenty-page research paper. No work would begin until the night before the paper was due.

One time, I had a five-page paper due in one class and a ten-page paper due in another class on the same day, and I didn't start either one until after dinner on the night before they were due. One of them was a research paper for which I had to go to the library to check out the books I would need, which, again, did not happen until after dinner on the night before the paper was due.

It's a sickness.

I also inherited from my mother a strong belief in the importance of timeliness, so I never, ever, not once, turned a paper in late. This was before email, so requests for extensions had to occur in person or on the phone with the professor, and the prospect of either mortified me down to my core, so I never asked for one.¹

How did I reconcile these conflicting characteristics of mine? By pulling all-nighters and writing very, very fast. Fortunately for me, I know how to write—by that I mean I know how to construct a sentence, and how to place sentences together with a logical, readable cadence. (You'd be surprised how many college students don't know how to do that.)² That carried me a long way, even when my sleep-deprived brain failed to produce any top-notch thoughts. As one professor wrote on one of my papers, "The mediocrity of your ideas is at odds with the loveliness of your prose"—which... ouch. That one stung, even though it contained a sort-of compliment.³

That time I just told you about, when I had a five-page paper and a ten-page paper due the same day? The very next day, I had a twenty-page paper due, which meant two all-nighters back-to-back, with—thanks to my class schedule and work obligations—no time to nap in between.

That first night went okay. I knocked out those two papers, and I was giddy and hyped up on sleep deprivation at breakfast the next morning. The second night was brutal. I would write a few sentences, maybe a paragraph or two, then take a five-to-ten-minute nap, wake up, and start the cycle all over again. Towards the end, my eyesight was so blurry, I couldn't even see what I was typing. It's a good thing the paper wasn't due until 5 p.m., because this method took all night and all day. After I turned the paper in (with five minutes to spare), I went back to my room and slept for sixteen hours straight.

Listen: When an all-night writing session was going well, I would invariably say to myself, This is easy. Why didn't I start this earlier? When an all-night writing session was going poorly, I would invariably say to myself, This is hard. Why didn't I start this earlier? For some reason, I was never able to internalize either of those thoughts enough to do better the next time.

It's a sickness.

I had a dot-matrix printer back then, the kind where you had to remove those side-strips with the tractor feed holes from the paper once it was printed, and separate all the pages by tearing along the microperforations between the sheets.⁴

The printer was quite loud when it was printing, screaming as the print head slalomed down the page, back and forth, back and forth. Freshman year, when I would finish up a paper at 2 or 3 in the morning, I would unplug my Apple IIe and printer, and take everything down to the study lounge in the basement to print everything out, so as not to disturb my sleeping roommate.

Sophomore year, I got a Mac, which was compatible with the computers in the campus computer lab. If I wanted to, I could take a floppy disk over to the lab and print my paper out there. It wasn't strictly necessary, because I lived in a single, and there were no worries about waking anybody up, but sometimes I would make the trip and pay for laser printing, so my paper would look super-professional, with clean, crisp lettering and no ragged edges, even if the ideas contained within the paper were... well, mediocre. (Yeah, that comment really got under my skin.)

Why oh why did I do things that way? I wish I could tell you. I want to say that I was having far too much fun to start my papers early, that I was partying and cavorting until the very last possible moment. I want to say that, but it wouldn't be accurate.

In truth, I spent a whole bunch of that time fretting over when I should get started. I should really get going on that paper today, I would think to myself. I've put it off for too long already. I don't even know if the library has the books I'm going to need! Why am I not starting? What's the matter with me? Okay, if I don't start it tonight, I definitely need to start it tomorrow, and so on until the night before the paper was due. This happened every single time I had to write a paper. Every single time.

It's a sickness.

Still, my lovely prose and mediocre thoughts were usually strong enough to carry the day. I never got worse than a B+ on a paper, and I made Dean's List or College Scholar (which is better) every semester of my college experience.

That is not a boast. It's a statement of fact. But I still think about how much better I could have done in college if I hadn't had such a procrastination problem.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹I did once have my friend Chad secure an extension for me on the phone, as chronicled in GTS #70, but that was a one-time outlier. Still, because I had an authorized extension (which I hadn't technically asked for myself), even that paper was not considered "late."

²Or maybe you wouldn't be. I don't know your surprise threshold.

³It also very much stuck with me. Longtime readers may recall that I mentioned it once before, in GTS #52. However, after more than 30 years of continuing to work on my writing, I can now report that that professor is dead.

⁴As I disclosed five years ago, I am very, very bad at tearing neatly along those microperforations. Man oh man, do I not miss perforated printer paper.

12/10/25

Hello, and welcome to the 374th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Three times now, I've asserted that my college stories, like every New Yorker cartoon, could all be captioned, "Christ, what an asshole." But here's a story from after college which shows that the affliction clearly transcended my college years.

I was working at HBO Studio Productions in New York. One morning, I stopped by the desk of Christopher Hughes.¹ He wasn't there, but I saw that he had procured a glazed donut for himself and had left it on his desk. I thought it would be funny if he came back and discovered that a huge, wet bite had been taken out of it.

Look: I wasn't a complete asshole. I knew he had gotten his donut from a street vendor outside, so I went downstairs and I bought a replacement donut. Then I came back and took my big, wet, illicit bite out of his donut, placed it back on his desk exactly where he had left it (well, except for the bite), and went back to my desk.

A few minutes later, I swung by Christopher's desk again, this time finding him there, looking mighty ticked off.

"Anything interesting happening this morning?" I asked him.

"Yeah," he spat out, very enraged. Some no-good motherfucker took a big ol' bite out my donut!"

"Oh, that's a damned shame," I said, sympathetically, and then produced the replacement from behind my back.

"It was you?" he said, clearly shocked.

"Yeah," I said, slowly coming to understand that this joke wasn't landing. "I thought it would be funny."

"It wasn't," Christopher assured me.

"It wasn't," said Christopher's boss, emerging from her office. "I can't believe you did that!"

"I got a replacement," I offered meekly, but they weren't having it.

What can I say? There have been times in my life in which my hilariousness (a.k.a. my assholery) has gotten me into trouble. This was one of those times. Still, I think things have improved. I know they have. To quote the great comic Taylor Tomlinson:

You have to work on yourself in your 20s, 'cause if you don't, then you'll turn 30, and all the shitty parts of your personality will solidify, and that'll just be who you are now. Your 20s are an opportunity to fish trash out of the lake before it freezes over...Better get all that out of there, 'cause winter is coming.²

I can't imagine sager advice for people in their 20s.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Last seen in GTS #316

²It's really worth watching the whole clip, rather than just reading an excerpt:

12/12/25

Hello, and welcome to the 375th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I was a website producer for a TV station in Portland, Maine. Our website and email domain host (Fox Interactive Media, or FIM for short) was changing servers, so our website and email were both down. This was an expected outage, and we were prepared for it.

In order to fire up our website and email on the new server, the IT guy at FIM needed some crucial technical information from me, which I supplied to him two weeks before the server swap. On the day of the swap, after our old server had been taken down, leaving us dark, he apparently forgot that I had already given him this info, so down we stayed, for much longer that we were expecting.

In order to obtain the needed information (information he understood was absolutely necessary to restore our email functionality), he... well, you can probably guess where this is going.

That's right. He sent me an email requesting the technical specs. An email. To request the information (he already had) he would need to restore our email functionality. The IT guy did this.

After a couple of hours, he got pretty mad that I hadn't responded, so he had someone call me to find out why.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/15/25

Hello, and welcome to the 375th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I watched the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles on TV with my dad. Of particular interest to my dad was the first-ever Olympic Women's Marathon, in which American Joan Benoit was favored. The network broadcast large chunks of the race, keeping the camera on Benoit as she maintained her steady lead.

The thing about a live television broadcast of marathon runners is that there's not much for the sports commentators to commentate on: She's running, she's running, she's running, she's still running, etc.

The folks in the broadcast booth that day were doing their best, but there just wasn't that much to talk about. My dad, a serious runner himself, would have preferred that they just shut up, because the only things he cared about were Benoit's speed and her form, both of which were excellent. Anything else the commentators wanted to talk about was just so much noise to him.

Benoit's stoic expression never wavered as she ran, except for one moment when, as she was rounding a corner and passing a cheering crowd, she flashed a very brief smile.

Well, finally something different had happened! The commentators seized upon that smile like starving hyenas happening upon a zebra carcass. "Did you see that smile?" "What could she have been smiling about?" "Do you think she knows she has this race locked up?" "What do you think she was thinking when she smiled like that?" and on and on.

Throughout it all, my dad was slapping his armrest, shouting at them to shut up. "Who cares what she smiled about? Who cares? Who cares?"

Seconds after Benoit won the marathon with a time of 2:24:52, a reporter on the field held a microphone in front of her face.

"Don't ask her about the smile," my dad warned, since the commentators in the booth were still talking about it.

"At one point in the race," the reporter said, and my dad groaned in disgust. "We all saw you smile very briefly," the reporter continued. "Do you remember what you were smiling about? Was that when you knew you had won?"

"Would you shut up about the damned smile!" my dad yelled over the reporter's question.

"Somebody was holding up a Bowdoin College banner," said Benoit with a grin, "and Bowdoin is my alma mater."

My dad cackled and pumped his fist in delight. You see, Bowdoin was his alma mater as well, so suddenly, all was forgiven.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

UPDATE: After posting this secret, I decided to try to find the clips in question. I could not find video of the actual moment of the smile, but I did find the post-marathon interview in which she was asked about it:

12/17/25

Hello, and welcome to the 377th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Even though (or perhaps because) Louis C.K.'s publicly revealed transgressions have identified him as a scumbag, I love this short bit of his:

It makes me think of my own kids, and how I'm their first asshole—not due to any in-their-face rage, as Louis C.K. describes above, but rather due to my sometimes twisted sense of humor, often aimed at amusing only me.

Once, when my kids were 10 and 12, we were at the grocery store, and the older one was looking with longing at the donut display in the bakery section.

"Why are you looking at those?" the younger one asked, with a trace of cynicism. "You know if you ask for one, Daddy's just gonna say no."

"Don't say that," I admonished. "You don't know that until you ask."

"Daddy, can I have a donut?" the older one asked, suddenly hopeful.

"No," I said.

Lest you think I was kidding, we did not get donuts that day. That's what makes it funny. To me.

Like I said, I'm their first asshole.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/19/25

Hello, and welcome to the 378th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In the summer of 1992, I went to Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey with Chad Anderson and Kate Culkin.¹ At this point in my life, I had a deep-seated terror of all amusement park rides, rooted in an early childhood experience in which my aunt Betty took me on a tilt-a-whirl for which I was far too little (my head was below the safety bar). When the ride began, it was only my death grip on the safety bar that prevented me from being hurled to my doom. I screamed for them to stop; my aunt screamed for them to stop, but the operators seemed to think the situation was kind of hilarious, and they kept the ride going extra long. They'd slow it down, until the ride would come almost to a complete stop, like we were all done, and then they'd ramp it back up, laughing merrily.

So, when I say I had a deep-seated terror or amusement park rides, I'm not screwing around. But I also couldn't be a lame-ass in front of Chad and Kate, so when they wanted to go on the Rolling Thunder roller coaster, I didn't say no or back out. I took the ride with them, and it freaked me right the hell out, just as I knew it would. I can't tell you how happy I was when the ride was over.

However, during the ride, a very light rain had started up, effectively scattering everyone waiting in line. Since there was no one else waiting, the operators asked if we wanted to go again.

I sure as hell didn't want to go again, but everyone else quite enthusiastically did, and it's not like I could be a lame-ass in front of the entire crowd. So up we all went again, the slow, dreadful, creaky ascent up to the first terrifying dive. Rolling Thunder operated on two parallel tracks, and both rows of cars were ascending simultaneously. A guy across from us shouted, "We're taking the F Train all the way to Brooklyn!" and Chad and I still say this to each other to this day, and I think Chad may shout it once in a while when he finds himself on another roller coaster's first steep climb. Everyone laughed at "We're taking the F Train all the way to Brooklyn!" and then we were off again, plunging for another pass.

There was no one waiting when we finished, so yup, we went up again. And again. With each pass, the rain got a little more intense, until it was a pounding downpour. I'm sure they were supposed to shut the ride down, but there were no safety inspectors around, so we just kept going, again and again and again, getting more and more soaked with each pass.
After twelve rides, I was completely over my fear of amusement park rides, and can report first-hand just how fun it is to ride a roller coaster in the pouring rain (though I don't know how safe it is). I could have gone another twelve times that day, but someone in charge finally shut the ride down.

We continued to walk around the park. We were wet, but it was warm and we were having fun. There was a log flume ride, which we didn't go on, but we saw that the log completed its run by zooming under a bridge, kicking up a wave of water, splashing anyone who happened to be standing on the bridge. We were already soaking wet, so we figured what the hell; let's stand on the bridge and catch the wave, so to speak.

Then the log passed under us, kicking up a giant wave as expected, and we realized we only thought we were soaking wet. This was like someone had picked up an entire lake and dropped it on top of us. For a couple of seconds, we were drowning, disoriented, drenched. Then it was over, and were standing on the bridge in the rain, each about four pounds heavier with water weight. It was funny, but suddenly, we weren't having quite as much fun. No matter. We left the park and went to a KMart to buy some dry clothes.

That was a great day. Here are a couple more pictures:

This is some ride other than Rolling Thunder, much earlier in the day, before it started raining.

Some will say I buried the lede, but we also met Daffy Duck that day. He's shorter in person (and a bit less daffy) than you might expect. Also, I won a stuffed Dalmatian in some game of skill, though I've forgotten which one.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Below is the original of the photo I used for today's header. You may notice that there's a photobomber behind us, spreading his arms wide, for attention, I guess, or maybe just general jackassery. This was before digital photos, so we didn't discover his photographic trespass until we got the film developed.

I didn't want this jackass mucking up my header image, so, I asked AI (yes, it's a scourge and I need to stop) to remove that asshole in the background, and AI knew exactly which asshole I was talking about.

This was the result:

Actually, it's mostly the result. AI removed the guy in the background as requested, but it also transformed our faces into unrecognizable, uncanny-valleyesque horror shows, so I had to Photoshop our original faces back. But otherwise, the AI's effort wasn't bad. It also, unasked, cleaned up those random feet behind Chad, and I was happy to see that the woman wearing the BARBIE BITCH shirt remained relatively unmolested by the process. (For reasons unknown, AI turned her head slightly.)

Below is an animated rendering of the transformation. I just love watching the photobomber's slow, McFly-style fade from existence.

click to enlarge

12/22/25

Hello, and welcome to the 379th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

For most of the '90s, I worked at HBO in New York City. One holiday season, the company gifted all employees with a monogrammed Montblanc pen—monogrammed with the "Home Box Office" company name, not individualized for each employee, of course. But who cares? It was a Montblanc pen! Montblanc fountain pens are among the most coveted (and most expensive) in the world, treasured by collectors for their exquisite writing capabilities and appreciation value. I was overwhelmed by the company's generosity. I mean, look at it. It's beautiful.

click to enlarge

Not only did it look good, but it felt good in my hand, weighty but perfectly balanced. A substantial pen, one I could use to get some real quality writing done. Then I took the cap off the pen and discovered that it wasn't a pen at all. It was a highlighter.

A highlighter? Listen, I know this will seem unconscionably ungrateful, but a fucking highlighter? Are you kidding me? What is the point of a Montblanc highlighter? Very classy studying? Pretentious copy-editing? A status symbol for script supervisors?

A Montblanc pen could be used to address fancy invitations, write intimate letters, or simply be displayed as a work of art. But a Montblanc highlighter? What a strangely stupid thing to create, let alone gift to thousands of employees. Montblanc apparently agrees, having long ago discontinued this item (though they do sell cartridge refills for those poor suckers who got saddled with one).

This was before a robust internet or any social media at all, but word of employee disappointment rippled through the company like the wave at a baseball game, eventually making its way to the CEO's office. The CEO sent a hurt, company-wide email, chastising us all for our ingratitude. Nevertheless, I believe to this day that it was actually a mistake. Somebody checked the wrong box when they placed the order, was too embarrassed to admit it, and knew that returning thousands of monogrammed highlighters to Montblanc was not an option. So, they tried to pass the gift off as intended, and took phony umbrage when employees didn't like it. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. But a Montblanc highlighter? Who in the world thought that was a good idea?

I eventually ditched mine, but somebody apparently held onto theirs, because they're selling it on eBay, thirtysomething years later, for four hundred dollars.

click to enlarge

Huh. Maybe I should have been more grateful.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/24/25

Hello, and welcome to the 380th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

As I've previously mentioned, my younger child used to have some pretty severe food allergies, which necessitated a bit of creativity in the kitchen. Fortunately, all of those allergies have been outgrown, but in 2010, we were still in the thick of it.

Holidays were especially difficult back then, because in other people's homes, it was hard to convey the seriousness of these allergies, and even if folks fully understood, there were always plenty of unsafe foods around. Opportunities of cross-contamination abounded.

So, for Christmas 2010, we hosted, and on the days leading up to Christmas (and Christmas Day itself), I made:

fruit salad
cranberry-orange relish
curried root vegetable stir-fry
roasted turkey breast
gravy
roasted onions
sautéed Brussels sprouts
vegetarian stuffing
roasted salmon with cilantro-lime glaze and a crushed-potato-chip-and-breadcrumb topping
sugar cookies
spice cake with lemon frosting
chocolate French silk pie with chocolate cookie crust

All of this was gluten- and dairy-free, yet cunningly concocted to all be delicious, without calling attention to those absences.

Christmas Day was going swimmingly until the last few minutes before dinnertime, when I put the salmon under the broiler to brown its crushed-potato-chip-and-breadcrumb topping, checked on it 90 seconds later, and saw that it was engulfed in flames.

That's when my already-overloaded brain short-circuited and shut down. Luckily, my wife, always cool in a crisis, quickly and calmly conveyed the smoldering fish to the deck, where she and my mother-in-law removed the black and smoldering crust with tongs, tossing it into the snow, and discovered a perfectly delicious roast salmon underneath.

After that, it was all gravy. Well, not all gravy. But we certainly had gravy.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/26/25

Hello, and welcome to the 381st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

From 1982 to 1987, my mom and I, New Englanders born and raised, lived in Wilsall, Montana (pop. 237). Winters could be harsh, with temperatures dropping well below zero during the coldest months, and the first snow of the season sometimes falling as early as August. "Ten months of winter, two months of visitors," we liked to say (ignoring the skiers, I guess).

Most Christmases, we flew back to Massachusetts to celebrate with family, first making the one-hour drive from our home in Wilsall to the the Gallatin Field airport in Belgrade. For Christmas 1985, I was leaving a week or so early to celebrate with my dad's side of the family. My mom, who had to stay a bit longer for work, was planning on flying out on December 23.

On the day of my departure, it was 50 below zero.¹ Our 1976 Subaru hatchback didn't even bother to turn over when we tried to start it up, as if to say, "You try spinning a crankshaft at 50 below, stupid human."

Our friend Ruth had a car with a diesel engine and a plug-in engine block heater, which my mom begged to borrow (the car, not the heater). Ruth was reluctant, because she had plans that day, but my mom can be very persuasive, so eventually we were on our way in Ruth's car, a little later than my mom would have preferred, but still with plenty of time to get to the airport.

Except, no. Six miles out of town, the car's engine succumbed to the cold, and wheezed its way to full stop, refusing to start up again.

In Montana, because conditions can be so severe, the rule is: if you see someone with car trouble, you stop. Always. This is not written down anywhere that I know about; it's just understood. Whenever we had car difficulty of any kind, it was always the first person to come along who would stop to offer assistance. Of course, being as rural as we were, the wait for the first person to come along could sometimes be considerable. Remember, this was before cell phones, so we really were at the mercy of potential passersby.

Luckily, passersby happened along soon enough, and a nice couple stopped for us. Leaving Ruth's broken-down car by the side of the road, they drove us 23 miles to Livingston, and then dropped us off near the on-ramp to I-90, which would take us the additional 38 miles to the airport. Standing by the side of the road, my mom and I stuck our thumbs out.

Now, the Montana standard of stopping for broken-down cars does not necessarily apply to hitchhikers. We stood there for a while, with our thumbs out in the 50-below cold. I was not dressed for the weather, having planned to be in a car, and then on a plane, and then in Massachusetts with its much more sensible winter temperatures. Also, those sleek, black, upright trolley suitcases you now see everywhere had yet to be invented, so my suitcase was big and awkward and heavy and maroon.² It was tough enough to withstand a gorilla attack, if a certain TV commercial was to be believed, but it was not in any way compact or easy to maneuver.

Someone finally did stop for us, agreeing to take us to Bozeman, 26 miles away, but not as far as the airport. Fine, fine. We still had time, because my mom believes in leaving very early to make it to a scheduled event, but we obviously didn't still have the margin we started with. My mom gets kind of tense if she's running late, so she was feeling a bit strained by this point.

In Bozeman, we called our friend Gene Shea from a payphone. Gene agreed to drive us to the airport, drop me off, and then drive my mom back to Wilsall. Nice guy, Gene.

Gene dropped off me and my big, heavy, maroon suitcase before my flight departed (but not much before), and then drove my mom back to Wilsall. On the way home, my mom observed that Ruth's car was gone, which was, you know, not great news.

When she got home, my mom called Ruth, who revealed that somebody had alerted her to her car's presence by the side of the road six miles out of town, and had driven her out to the spot, where the car had started right up. That's small town life for you. Everybody knows everybody's business and—more importantly—everybody's car.

My various flights to Massachusetts were without incident, but my mom's flights, a week or later, were beset by bad weather. She was stranded overnight in Billings, and then stranded overnight again in Denver, where she was interviewed by a local news crew talking to passengers whose flights had been canceled. She got to watch herself on the evening news that night from a hotel room in Denver, and reported later that she looked quite frazzled on TV. (I have no doubt.)

My mom finally arrived at her parents' house late on Christmas Day, and discovered that all festivities had been held for her. No one had opened a present, and the uncooked turkey was still in the fridge. We celebrated Christmas, with all the trappings, on December 26, forty years ago today, because family is more important than punctuality.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Remember in The Martian, when a frustrated and imperiled Mark Watney says, "Fuck you, Mars"? Well, if you don't, here it is:

On that morning, when it plausibly could have been warmer on Mars than it was where we were standing, I very much felt like saying, "Fuck you, Montana!"

²The maroon part isn't important, but I'm trying to paint a picture here.

12/29/25

Hello, and welcome to the 382nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This was many years ago. My son came to me and said, "Hey, can you buy some more bread? The bread in the cabinet is all moldy."

"Where is it now?" I said.

"It's still in the cabinet."

"So, you saw the bread in the cabinet was all moldy, but you just left it there?"

"Yeah, sorry," said my son. "It made me nervous."

"You should just throw it out," Kate chimed in. "It's not like it's going to attack you."

"Oh yeah?" I said. "Tell that to Gary Hendershot."

"Who's Gary Hendershot?" said my son.

"Gary Hendershot was a guy who lived in Philadelphia in the '70s, and he left a loaf of bread out on the kitchen counter and forgot all about it. After nine months or so, the mold on the bread achieved sentience. Do you know what sentience means?"

"Yes," said my son, exasperated.

"Okay, good. Well, in any case, the mold was sentient, but it still lacked mobility, so it's not like it could do anything. It just sat there on the kitchen counter, becoming more and more enraged at the world. Then one day, Gary Hendershot got really drunk, and he fell asleep with his face down on the kitchen counter, and the moldy bread ate off half of his face. He used to go around to schools, giving talks about the dangers of leaving bread unattended. He wore this silk mask that covered half his face. Nice guy. I met him when he came to my high school in '85."

"That's not a true story!" said my son.

"You're right," I confessed. "He didn't live in Philadelphia. I think it might have been Cleveland."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

12/31/25

Hello, and welcome to the 383rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

This happened ten years ago. I was standing in the checkout line at Trader Joe's, and the clerk was a cute, twentysomething gal, who was amiably chatting with a group of twentysomething acquaintances who were buying various cool Trader Joe's items. They all seemed so young and creative and hip—artists of some kind, no doubt. Filmmakers or painters or musicians, or maybe some of each.

Standing there behind them, I could feel every single one of my 45 years, and I suddenly panicked that I must look middle-aged and dull and decidedly un-hip to them. A square, to use a decidedly outdated expression. (To be clear, none of them had given me even the slightest glance.)

The hipsters completed their purchase, and it was my turn in line. I felt an overwhelming desire to tell the clerk that I was cool too, that I was creative too, that I was the goddamned head writer of the web series Ragged Isle, which had won awards even!

Except, that would have been an insane thing to do, and maybe a little creepy. (Also, I was not, nor have I ever been, cool.)

Listen: It wasn't that I wanted to flirt or brag (honest), but I just wanted her to think I had a place in the creative artistic community she seemed to be a part of, and right then, at that moment, Ragged Isle was one of the most creative things I'd ever been involved in. (I've worked on many, many projects since then, but Ragged Isle is still right up there.)

Still, this would have been a ludicrous thing to blurt out to her, and besides, most of the people on the planet have never even heard of Ragged Isle, so it would have been pretty pathetic as well.

So, as she rang up my purchases, we instead discussed the awesomeness of Trader Joe's Crispy Crunchy Broccoli Florets and Sweet Sriracha Uncured Bacon Jerky, both of which I was buying in semi-bulk. As I swiped my debit card and collected my receipt, the clerk said to me (and I swear this is true): "Aren't you the head writer for Ragged Isle?"¹

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Clarification: Unlike the header image, I was not wearing my Ragged Isle t-shirt.

1/2/26

Hello, and welcome to the 384th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Once, when I was about six years old, I was playing horseshoes at the summer camp my family ran. I was up next, and as I leaned down to pick up my horseshoes, my temple collided with a horseshoe at the end of the current thrower's powerful backswing. I collapsed onto the grass, bleeding profusely from my forehead.

My mother was summoned, and she drove me to the local hospital for stitches. On the way, clutching a blood-soaked rag to my head, I said, "Hey, Mom."

"What?" she said, tense behind the wheel.

Leaning into (and relishing) the alliteration, I said, "I was hit in the head with a horseshoe. How horrible!"

"That's great, Greg," said my mom.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.¹

¹Today's secret serves as a preface of sorts for next week's theme: "Injury Week." Prepare yourselves, because it's going to get grisly.

1/5/26

Hello, and welcome to the 385th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

For the past five and a half years, as I've strip-mined my past for Greg Tulonen Secrets fodder, there are certain incidents that have been withheld, some due to subconscious (or fully conscious) embarrassment or shame. As I wrote in season three finale:

Well, I might be back for a fourth season someday, but there will always be secrets that are too private for me to share, or too sad, or too boring, or too embarrassing, or too shameful.

But the longer I do this thing, the harder it is for me to come up with fresh anecdotes. I mean, there have been long stretches of my life that were actively boring and/or not particularly secret-worthy, and I certainly don't want this project to slip into mundanity.¹

So, this week, I'll be cutting a little closer to the bone (literally, in some instances) as I relay stories of injuries I've sustained over the years, injuries I was too stupid or scared or ashamed to report (except in one instance, which was impossible to keep secret).

Things might get dark.²

We begin in 1981. I was twelve years old, and I had just gotten a new bike. I was riding around the neighborhood in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, having a great time. The bike was a smooth ride, and I was cruising like a boss until the bike's front tire got lodged in a crack in the asphalt, and I discovered first-hand (well, so to speak) the structural feature of boys' bicycles that has plagued my gender ever since bike manufacturers moved on from the penny-farthing design.

I'm talking, of course, about... [deep, menacing voice]

That damned crossbar, the horizontal metal rod between the handlebars and the seat, can be a hazard if you happen to fall upon it, the impact occurring right where it really hits home. I collided with that bar with the force of a freight train, and I honestly think I have a pretty good idea what it would feel like to be kicked in the nuts by a NFL kicker wearing steel-toed boots.

I lay in the street, my feet still tangled up in the bike, dazed by a pain so extreme I could barely breathe or form a thought. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I couldn't even moan. I just lay there, my cheek resting on the pavement, staring straight ahead at bits of gravel in the road.

How long I lay there I couldn't say. The throbbing ache was so all-consuming, the concept of time itself ceased to hold any meaning. Gradually, and agonizingly slowly, the pain began to subside. It didn't go away entirely, of course, but it waned enough for me to get myself out of the street. After a while, I walked my bike home, not out of fear, but because my testicles couldn't take the pressure of sitting on the bicycle seat again.

Now, obviously, I should have told my mother about this incident, but, well, I was twelve years old, and the thought of talking to my mom about an injury in that particular region filled me with embarrassment and dread. So, I kept it to myself, and didn't mention anything to anyone when my balls swelled up like nectarines, and giant purple bruises formed along my inner thighs from groin to knees.³

I received no medical attention, but after a few weeks, everything looked and felt basically normal, and if my mom wondered why I'd stopped riding my bike all of a sudden, she didn't mention it.

I now know how stupid it was to keep this secret. There could have been serious internal damage, and I definitely needed to be checked out. But things worked out okay, I think. I have two wonderful kids, so everything down there works like it's supposed to.⁴ But still.

Stay tuned all this week for more grisly tales of secret injuries, if you can stomach it.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹"Too late," some of my longtime readers may be saying.

²Wait. Haven't we been down this road before? Who could forget the injuries reported in GTS #6 (kicked in the chest by a cow), GTS #15 (broke my arm doing a card trick), GTS #47 (tore open my elbow performing a movie stunt), GTS #142 (sliced off the tip of my finger), GTS #169 (got punched in the face), GTS #242 (assaulted by a podiatrist), GTS #304 (bitten by a dog), or GTS #384 (hit in the head with a horseshoe; how horrible)?

So, what do I mean when I say, "Things might get dark," and why is there a trigger warning above? Are this week's injuries somehow worse than anything previously shared?

Well, yeah. Not necessarily due to severity, but due to the emotional weight they carry, as well as my failure to properly tend to them at the time. You'll see.

³Sorry, mom. That trigger warning is up there for a reason.

⁴Admittedly, one of them was conceived with an assist from modern medicine, as chronicled in GTS #187.

1/7/26

Hello, and welcome to the 386th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Today's injury occurred in the fall of 1982. My mom and I had just moved from Fitchburg, Massachusetts to Wilsall, Montana (pop. 237). I was the new kid among a very tight-knit group of eighth graders who had all known each other since kindergarten. I was doing my best to fit in, but there had been some bumps.¹

For homecoming, each class had to design a float for the homecoming parade. I threw myself into this endeavor with fervid enthusiasm. This was a chance to interact with my classmates after school, to give them a chance to get to know the real Greg, in all his weirdness.

We spent a pretty terrific afternoon outfitting our gym teacher's truck with chicken wire, tissue paper, giant horns, and giant eyes, turning it into a mobile model of our mascot, the longhorn. I felt for the first time like I was one of the gang. People laughed at my jokes and listened to my ideas. While the paint dried on the float, we walked back to the school together as a group to gather more supplies.

A car driven by some upperclassmen pulled up alongside us and came to a stop. Someone in my class decided it would be funny to sit on top of the car's trunk and demand a slow ride back to school. Soon others joined him, and I, now being one of the gang, joined them as well. All of us were sitting on the trunk, and if the upperclassman drove slowly enough, we could all make it back to school in style.

Only, that's not what happened. Seemingly all at once, as if reacting to a signal that only I could not detect, everybody but me got off the trunk at the exact same time, an instant before the driver floored it and peeled out. I came flying off the back of the car and landed in the road, which felt exactly like you might imagine what flying off the back of a speeding car and landing in the road might feel like.

I was hugely embarrassed, so I scrambled to my feet, determined to make it seem like this was no big deal, that I was fine, and the whole thing was kind of funny really.

Except, that tactic immediately failed, because, as my classmates pointed out, I was bleeding profusely from the back of my head. They advised me to go home, and go home I did.

But I didn't want to squander the friendship capital I'd been building up all afternoon, so I wet a washcloth to clean all the gravel and grit out of the back of my head, determined with my fingers that the blood around the wound was coagulating (more or less), and I went back to work on the float some more.

My mother, who was privy to none of this, found the following when she got home from work at the high school:

a trail of blood drops leading from the front door to the bathroom
a bloody washcloth on the bathroom sink
no sign of her son

There were no cellphones back then, of course, so she went back to school to see if she could find out what was going on. Some kids told her some wildly exaggerated rumors about me leaping off the back of a truck or getting run over or something, but nobody knew for sure what had happened. So, she found out where my class was constructing our float, and she walked over there to find out if I was still in one piece.

I was, sort-of, but she wanted me to come home with her, which was probably the right call.

I never saw a doctor about it, but my science teacher, Carol Galey, did have a look the next day. She said it would probably be fine. And it was. But my new friends, much to my perpetual embarrassment, never forgot (and never let me forget) about this incident.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹See, for example, GTS #310.

1/9/26

Hello, and welcome to the 387th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I can't remember exactly when this happened, but I it was at my dad's house, where I was staying for the summer. I woke up one morning, and both my dad and my stepmother had, as expected, already gone off to work. I went to the kitchen to fix myself some breakfast, and on the counter lay a fully loaded squirt gun.

The house was always immaculate, with nothing out of place on any surface. So a stray squirt gun seemed incongruous, but certainly not alarming. I picked it up and started playing with it—lightly squirting the counter and floor, and striking various tough-guy poses. James Bond. Starsky and/or Hutch. Dirty Harry. You get the idea.

After all that exertion, I had built up quite a thirst, so I pointed the squirt gun into my mouth and pulled the trigger. The liquid hit the back of my throat, and that's when I discovered that the gun hadn't been loaded with water; it had been loaded with liquid ammonia.

I clutched at my throat, which was burning with agonizing fire, and I ran to the sink to drink some real water, but found that it hurt tremendously to swallow anything.

I learned later that day that my father, a serious runner, had been, during his morning runs, repeatedly approached by unleashed dogs, who chased after him and literally nipped at his heels. So, he had loaded a squirt gun with ammonia to stave off these canine incursions. He told me a "hilarious" story about a dog that had lunged at him that morning. He laughed as he described squirting the ammonia directly into the dog's mouth. Knowing exactly what that felt like, I didn't find the story all that funny.

In the immediate aftermath of accidentally swallowing ammonia, I, very obviously, should have gone to the ER, but in that moment, I knew that neither my dad nor my stepmom would be home for hours, and I also knew with absolute certainty that if I called my dad at work to tell him what had happened, that his first reaction would be one of rage. He'd be concerned about me, of course, but first, he'd be angry. My dad had a terrifying temper, and I was more afraid of it than I was of my injury.

So, I carefully placed the squirt gun exactly where I had found it, wiped up all the drops of liquid ammonia that I had sqirted during my horseplay, and I remained silent about all of it until...

Well, until today. This moment.

After a couple of months—yes, months—the pain in my throat had completely faded, but the knot in my stomach that formed whenever I thought about this incident never did.

Listen: I never intended to share this story in this series. I don't mean I considered and then rejected the idea. I mean it never even occurred to me until I stumbled into "Injury Week" and finally acknowledged this troubling pattern in my life.

This one, though, is especially painful to me. It makes me feel like a cowardly fool, and it may be the most unflattering thing I've ever shared about my father. I mean, that dog story? Jesus Christ! Could he not have at least used vinegar? Or just plain water? I hate everything about this.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/12/26

Hello, and welcome to the 388th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I was driving with my younger child ("Flapjack" for the purposes of this story, and seven years old at the time). Flapjack kept up a continuous commentary that went a little something like this:

"We're going northeast... northeast... northeast... Now we're turning, turning... We're going east. Definitely east. We're turning, turning. We're going southeast... southeast... southeast... Now we're going north. We're going north. Definitely north... Now we're going northwest..." and so on.

In case you were wondering, every single navigational assertion was completely, spectacularly wrong. But the best part about the whole thing (aside from the wild inaccuracies) was that each new directional declaration was accompanied by its own concise, Beat poetry-style theme song: "Human compass... ba ba!"

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/14/26

Hello, and welcome to the 389th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I had some fun a few years back, sharing the secret that I once ironed Gilbert Gottfried's pants while he stood by in his underwear. My fun was derived from the fact that it's a funny story (and image), but mostly because at the time, I provided no context. Today, I have another Gilbert Gottfried story, and a little context is required this time.

I was working as a freelance PA on the cable TV show Gottfried hosted called USA Up All Night, which screened cheesy, low-budget B-movies, bookended by skits and commentary by Gottfried.

Gottfried had just delivered a line in his trademark shrill voice about how the movie being shown was driving him "right up the wall," and the writer-director gently reminded him that as written, the line was "straight up the wall."

In mock awed admiration, I exclaimed, "Ah, the writer speaks!" and Gottfried actually cracked up laughing—not necessarily because my joke had been so funny, but more likely because a lowly PA had dared to poke fun at somebody so much higher up the food chain.

Another crew member pulled me aside during a break, and advised me that my joke might be a good way to get myself blacklisted—which, I mean, blacklisted by USA Up All Night? I've certainly endured worse. But they actually asked me back quite a few more times after that, so I guess I didn't do myself any harm.

By the way, in case you were wondering: Gilbert Gottfried did not talk like that offscreen.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/16/26

Hello, and welcome to the 390th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

My mom (whose birthday is tomorrow; happy birthday, Mom!) was my English teacher for all four years of my high school. There was no other option, since she made up the entire English department of Wilsall High School in Wilsall, Montana (pop. 237). Not that I minded (she was a great teacher), but it did sometimes make for some awkward situations.¹

My mom is a big fan of Shakespeare. It's not hard to see why. Shakespeare's skills with English—his rhythm and cadence and turns of phrase and neologisms—are wondrous to behold, and have permeated our language and culture for the past four hundred years. But more than that, his keen observances of human nature—of universal truths about relationships, emotions, thoughts, and actions—transcend class, cultures, race, and time itself, exposing behavior that feels as true today as it did in the sixteenth century. And so, in my mom's English class, we read Shakespeare plays all four years of high school.

Freshman year, the first play we read was (of course) Romeo and Juliet, which is often mistaken for a story of a great romance, ignoring the fact that it's about two teenagers who know each other for less than a week before they both tragically kill themselves (spoiler!).

Most people's first exposure to Shakespeare is on the page rather than the stage, which is unfortunate, since the language, while beautiful, can also be impenetrable to the first-time reader. My mom tried to guide her students over the language barrier by taking them on deep dives through the opening scenes, coaxing out meaning from the iambic pentameter therein.

In an early scene we examined as a class, Romeo's quick-witted best friend, Mercutio, tries to snap a lovestruck Romeo out of his infatuation with Juliet by reminding him of his previous crush, Rosaline (and by "previous," I mean literally the previous day). Mercutio says:

I conjure thee by Rosaline's bright eyes,
By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,
By her fine foot, straight leg and quivering thigh
And the demesnes that there adjacent lie,
That in thy likeness thou appear to us!

My mom zeroed in on the line, "And the demesnes that there adjacent lie," asking the class, "What do you think that means?"

Dead silence from the class.

I knew that "demesnes" meant land adjacent to a manor. Therefore, Mercutio was referring to a certain metaphorical piece of real estate located adjacent to Rosaline's "quivering thigh." In other words, he was talking about Rosaline's... well, you get it.

But I'd be damned if I was going to be the one to say it.

My mom let the silence linger, eventually casting an exasperated, expectant look at me, which meant, I know you know the answer to this! Why aren't you saying anything?

I gave her a blank stare back, which meant, You're out of your mind if you think I'm going to say "He's talking about Rosaline's pussy" in front of my mother, in front of the whole class!

Finally, my mom gave up and said, "A little dirty joking among teenage boys?"—much softer phrasing than what I'd been thinking. That I would have been willing to say, if I'd thought of it.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹See, for example, GTS #156.

1/19/26

Hello, and welcome to the 391st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One time, when my dad was living in Japan, he called my house in Montana at 3 in the morning. My mom was asleep, of course, and answered the phone in a groggy and annoyed state. My dad assured my mother that it was 7 a.m. where she was, because he had done the math before making the call: Japan was 13 hours ahead of his home on the east coast, you see, so it followed that it was 11 hours ahead of Montana, which is two hours behind the east coast.

Now, if you have a good grasp of math (and know how time zones work), you already know that this was not sound thinking on my dad's part, which my mother tried to relay, but he kept insisting he was right.

He was so vehement, my mom briefly considered the possibility that she might be late for work, but the total blackness outside convinced her she wasn't.

As for me, I slept through the entire exchange, since my mom wasn't willing to wake me up to talk to my longitudinally challenged dad.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/21/26

Hello, and welcome to the 392nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In GTS #137, I described an incident involving a former colleague, whom I dubbed (somewhat ironically) "Mr. Popular." By far the least fun aspect of my job came every weekday, 6-9 a.m., as I generated website content to accompany the television simulcast of Mr. Popular's live, right-wing morning radio talk show.

Mr. Popular was a jackass in all the ways you would expect: his lockstep right-wing viewpoints, his loose grasp of actual facts, his lame attempts at humor at liberals' expense. I often found myself yelling at my TV screen, or jumping onto his webpage to comment as Kurt Bandersnatch.¹ (Fortunately, we were in separate buildings.)

But he was also a jackass in little petty ways that you might not expect. During the broadcast, Mr. Popular stayed in constant DM communication with the show's simulcast director and me—or that was the ideal, anyway. We relied on Mr. Popular to feed us information about the show's guests, so we could create graphics, prep web elements, etc. (There was an online calendar set up for this purpose, so we could theoretically have this information well in advance, but Mr. Popular never bothered to fill it out.)

Mr. Popular liked to wait until about five seconds before we came back on air before sharing guests' names with us. We had a camera feed on him at all times, including during the commercial breaks, so we could clearly see when a guest sat down in the studio. We would send Mr. Popular a DM saying: "Hey, Mr. Popular, who is that?" We could also see Mr. Popular's computer screen in our video feed, so we could see him get the message, could see him read it, and could see him completely ignore it until we were five seconds to air. He invariably claimed: "Oh sorry, I just saw that," despite the fact that we'd told him several times we could see him getting our messages on camera. It was a weird little power play that actually hurt the show, a show he seemed to care deeply about.

The radio show was much more successful than the TV simulcast, which didn't garner a single ratings point for the television station in the entire time it was on the air with us. Mr. Popular insisted that this was a statistical anomaly, and that a sizable chunk of viewers somehow weren't being counted.

He cited as evidence the fact that he could not go out in public without being mobbed by fans. He was constantly calling us up to tell us about this phenomenon, regularly regaling us with long stories of his latest fan-filled trip to a supermarket or restaurant, assuring us every time that he wasn't in this to be famous; he was in it to change the world. (Yes, that's an actual quote.)

He also theorized that maybe the ratings anomaly was due to responders thinking they were watching a cable news show rather than a local station. An easy mistake to make, he assured us. Our office manager took a drive down to the ratings offices in Boston to take a look at the physical diaries, ultimately determining that Mr. Popular's theory was... incorrect.

Listen: Despite our vastly different points of view, I wouldn't say Mr. Popular was evil. An asshole and a jackass, to be sure, but also human. When a breast cancer awareness organization wanted to launch a specialty license plate to raise money for breast cancer research, Mr. Popular had the organizers on his show several times to drum up interest, and featured the sample plate on the set of the show during the months they were gathering public support. He won an award for his efforts, and during the ceremony, he choked up talking about his mother's breast cancer.

It's hard to hate a guy after you've seen him cry about his mom.

When our sales manager finally canceled the television broadcast (his radio show would continue), Mr. Popular tried to argue in the in-person meeting (which I also attended) that the TV station simply needed to do more promotion.

"We've done all the promotion we're going to do," said the Sales Manager. "It's not that our audience doesn't know who you are. They know who you are; they just don't like you."

(I'll admit, it was hard not to laugh out loud at that one.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹See GTS #254's second footnote.

1/23/26

Hello, and welcome to the 393rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When my kids were very little, I had a standard, go-to response whenever they asked me what I was doing, when what I was doing was perfectly obvious. That go-to response was: "Making spaghetti."

Examples:

My older child, 7 or 8 years old, bursting into the bathroom where I'm taking a shower, and calling to me through the shower curtain: "Daddy, what are you doing?"

Me: "Making spaghetti."

or:

My younger child, 9 or 10 years old, approaching me in the living room, where I'm sitting on the couch, reading a book, deeply absorbed: "Daddy, what are you doing?"

Me: "Making spaghetti."

So... like that. You get it.

By the time they were in their early 20s, I don't think I'd given that answer in over a decade, mostly because my kids had stopped asking me what I was doing when it was obvious what I was doing, either because they could figure it out for themselves, or because they were weary of receiving the same smart-ass response every time.

One night, as I was heading to the kitchen, I said, "I'm going to make spaghetti." This wasn't in response to somebody's dumb question, but rather something I was really about to do in real life. (Also, I had pretty much forgotten that long-ago joke.)

Nevertheless, my older child remarked, "But how can I trust you? How am I supposed to believe you're really making spaghetti after all those times you lied to us about making spaghetti?"

I had no answer for him, except: "You're not."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/26/26

Hello, and welcome to the 394th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I've written before about my extreme stage fright,¹ but in grad school, I once took a "Voice and Performance" class, with the ultimate aim of writing and staging a live performance piece. This may seem contradictory, but I think I was trying to tackle my fear head-on.

My final piece was a dramatic monologue called "The Meanest Clown in the World," based on a short story I had written as an undergrad. My idea was to perform the monologue while applying full clown makeup, which seems a bit crazy to me now.

On the big day, I set up in front of my audience, terrified, and began my monologue, while simultaneously applying a base coat of greasepaint to my face. Then, as I began transitioning to the detail work of adding different colored makeup around my eyes, nose, and mouth (while continuing with my monologue), I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that my right hand was shaking. Badly.

This was no good. There was no way for me to apply makeup with a trembling hand. Taking a deep breath, I looked at my hand, and willed it to stop shaking. Somehow, that worked, and I finished my monologue (and make-up job) to great acclaim from my classmates.²

Fortunately or unfortunately, there's no video record of this performance. (The video guy was sick that day.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹See GTS #95 and #174.

²I have no idea how I accomplished this, and I doubt I could duplicate the feat today. It truly seemed like a miracle at the time.

1/28/26

Hello, and welcome to the 395th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Years ago, I worked a very early shift at a TV station in one of the "scruffier" sections of Portland, Maine (meaning the neighborhood was studded with shelters and soup kitchens, but still pretty safe because it's Portland). One morning, soon after I got to work, the doorbell to the station began ringing. Repeatedly.

This was an anomaly. It was 6 a.m. and the front door was still locked . The only people in the building besides myself were the board operator overseeing our broadcast feed, and Amie Marzen, producer of our local talk radio show simulcast (described in more detail in GTS #137 and #392). Both of them were pretty busy doing their jobs, so I went to check it out.

I opened the front door, and on the stoop stood an unhoused man seeking entry. He was rather nattily dressed, wearing a clean if threadbare sweater-vest, a decent overcoat, and newish-looking glasses. He animatedly and somewhat incoherently tried to tell me about a conspiracy afoot among shelters in Maine and Vermont. He was friendly and persistent, asserting that he needed to come in to deliver a handwritten note to our news director, who, this fellow claimed, knew all about it and was expecting this visit.

Our news was outsourced to another station. The closest thing we had to a "news director" on the premises was Amie, who turned out to know nothing about any of this. I took the note. It was illegible. I told the man I would not be able to let him in, but I wished him well. He accepted this news graciously, and departed from our stoop.

About ten minutes later he was back, ringing and ringing our doorbell once again. I returned to the front door and opened it, intending to tell him he would have to go away.

"This is the last time I'll bother you, I promise," he said, as polite as ever, before I could say a word, "but it's very important that I deliver this. It explains everything I've been trying to tell you." He held something out in his hand, and I looked down at it.

It was a snow globe.

I didn't take the snow globe, but I've thought about this man and his snow globe many times since that morning. Nothing he said made much sense, but decades of exposure to conspiracy theories and science fiction movies sent me down a flight of fancy in which he was actually trying to tell me something important, but I, like everyone in the whole world (besides him), was a dupe, living in the dark, unable to see or understand. You know, like in Terminator 2, when everyone thinks Sarah Connor is crazy because she keeps going on and on about the upcoming robot apocalypse.

But the truth is, that kind of flight of fancy only romanticizes and trivializes mental illness. That was a real person in front of me who needed help, and handing me that snow globe was the only way he knew how to ask for it.

As for me, I had no idea how to answer.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

1/30/26

Hello, and welcome to the 396th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

We've been through a lot together, you and I, nearly 400 secrets in. I've shared some of my most vulnerable moments, some of my deepest embarrassments, and here we all still are, still plugging away, dissecting my life for all to observe and critique. So, I think I can trust you all when I admit that this morning, just now, I used the "Find My Phone" feature on my iPhone to try to find my phone. (When it started vibrating in my hand, I knew I'd made a colossal blunder.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/2/26

Hello, and welcome to the 397th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In 2014, in an alleged attempt to "avoid confusion," the conference rooms at my work were renamed after Maine rivers/bodies of water. In an all-staff email, we learned that:

The 3rd floor large conference room was now called "Androscoggin."
The 2nd floor small conference room was now called "Allagash."
The 2nd floor corner meeting room was now called "Kennebec."
The 2nd floor middle meeting room was now called "Penobscot."
The 2nd floor front meeting room was now called "Sheepscot."
The 3rd floor small conference room was now called "Sebago."

While I had to admire the creativity, as well as the commitment to the state in which we were operating, I was hard-pressed to understand how this re-naming would prevent confusion, as indeed it did not, moving forward after that. Confusion abounded.

Then, in 2020, we switched to a work-from-home model due to COVID-19, and we never came back to the office, so that particular line of confusion was forever solved.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/4/26

Hello, and welcome to the 398th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

In college, Jim Nida, Jeff McMahan, and I liked to seek out giant animal statues and have our picture taken with them.¹ And when I assert that we "liked" to do that, I mean that we did it twice, seen in the header image above, and the full images below. (As Jim says now, "Honestly it's like we were just getting started on a collection and [it] seems like there were missed opportunities.")

Kampy the Squirrel, mascot for Kampersville, a campground on Lake Dunmore in Salisbury, Vermont. Constructed in 1988 by concrete sculpture artist T.J. Neil.

Queen Connie, an enormous concrete gorilla erected in 1987 on Route 7 in Leicester, Vermont to serve as a mascot for the Pioneer Auto Sales used car lot. This one is also by T.J. Neil, though we certainly didn't know that at the time.

As Jim notes above, there definitely were some missed opportunities, but we were also at the tail-end of the era of local businesses erecting all sorts of giant, attention-grabbing displays and gimmicks in front of their stores to attract passing motorists. Those kitschy slices of Americana seem to be a dying art. With major highways bypassing small towns, and promotion migrating to the internet, a bland sameness has settled over the country.

Okay, well, that got a little grim. Fortunately, many of these silly giant statues are still standing all over the country. What do you say, guys? Road trip?

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Photos by Katherine Stebbins.

2/6/26

Hello, and welcome to the 399th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Over the years, I've shared a lot of secrets about celebrity encounters, famous and semi-famous people with whom I've had brief personal interactions or exchanges. But what about the almosts? What about the celebrities I could have met, if I had been bolder, or ruder, or luckier? What about the "celebrity-adjacent" stories?¹

***
I suppose I could share the story of Michael Keaton being in the same Wilsall, Montana bar as I was back in the early '80s. It's an "adjacent" encounter in that I did not interact with him in any way, because literally the entire high school (all 42 of us) had come into the bar at the same time, after a home game basketball victory, and Keaton, already sitting at the bar, was immediately mobbed by my classmates, enough so that he eventually shook the bartender's hand and left.

What, you may be asking, was the star of Mr. Mom and Night Shift² doing in a bar in the tiny, tiny town of Wilsall, Montana (pop. 237)? As it turns out, Keaton is an avid fisherman, and there are some fine fishing in that part of the world. In fact, he had hired a local as a guide, to show him all the best spots.

***
Or maybe I should impart the story about the time I was looking for work in Manhattan. Every morning, wearing a jacket and tie and holding a folder stuffed with copies of my very thin resumé, I would take the bus from New Jersey into Manhattan.³

I didn't have much of an idea of what I should do after I got into Manhattan. I would drop my resumé off at various places I thought I might like to work, and generally just hang around the city like a sad dullard, hoping that by some miracle, a job would drop into my lap through a kind of metropolitan osmosis.⁴

One day, for no particular reason, I was hanging out in Rockefeller Center. Standing outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza (or the G.E. Building, as it was known at the time) was Biff Henderson, stage manager for Late Night with David Letterman. Henderson had been made famous by appearing in numerous comedy bits featuring members of the Late Night crew. I thought about approaching him, but I figured that since he was wearing his signature headset, he might be outside in some official capacity, which might mean...

Yup. Pretty soon, David Letterman himself walked out of the building, spoke a few words to Biff, and then headed over to a waiting limo. He stood outside the limo for a moment, looking over the crowd. He was about ten feet away from me.

Give him your resumé! I screamed at myself inside my head, but I could not get my legs to move. Letterman cast a glance directly at me, and then stepped into the limousine, leaving the door open. I could see him sitting there, and I still could have approached him. But I didn't.

Then, Barbara Gaines, executive producer of Late Night, was standing in front of the limo, chatting with a staffer. Gaines was another player in various Late Night bits, though usually off-screen, shouting from backstage answers to Dave's clueless questions about what was supposed to be happening on the show.

Gaines I did approach, calling her by name, introducing myself, and handing her a copy of my resumé. I babbled to her about how much I liked the show and how much I needed a job, and she listened with polite disinterest. I walked a few feet away and watched her get into the limousine with Dave, still holding my resumé. I saw Dave ask her what she was holding, and then the door to the limousine closed, and the limo drove off.

I constructed fantasy for myself that Dave would make a comedy bit out of this, calling me while on the air to interview me. I'd hang around at home by the phone at 5:45 p.m., which is around the time I figured this bit would take place. This was stupid and obviously never happened. But that's my David Letterman story. Pretty lame, isn't it?

***
Finally, there's the Jonathan Richman concert at the Lone Star Roadhouse in New York City that Chad Anderson, Kate Culkin, and I attended in 1992. The Roadhouse had a wraparound indoor balcony outfitted with tables and chairs, where audience members could sit and order a burger while they watched the show.

Chad, Kate, and I were at one such table, enjoying our burgers, fries, Cokes, and the show itself. (If you've been to a Jonathan Richman concert, you know he always puts on a great show.) At the next table sat an elderly gentleman holding a sketchpad, drawing pictures of the performers on stage. To me, his pictures looked to be very much like the work of Jules Feiffer, whose illustrations for Norton Juster's children's fantasy novel The Phantom Tollbooth had enchanted me as a child. Feiffer had a very distinct visual style, and it seemed to me that the gentleman at the next table was employing a similar (if not the exact same) style.

Rhyme and Reason, from The Phantom Tollbooth. Illustration by Jules Feiffer.

I whispered to Chad and Kate my suspicion that Jules Feiffer was at the next table, but I said nothing to the man himself, partly because I was shy, partly because I suspected I'd be mortified if I asked him if he was Jules Feiffer and he wasn't Jules Feiffer ("What do you mean my drawing style looks like somebody else's work? Are you calling me a hack?"), and partly because I knew that he (if he was indeed Feiffer) didn't hold those Phantom Tollobooth illustrations I so admired in very high regard.

Eventually, the man departed, mid-concert, without me having said a word to him.

Later that same month, Kate and I, for reasons I've now forgotten, went to see the Hugh Hefner documentary, Hugh Hefner: Once Upon a Time, which features hagiographic interviews about Hefner's life and career with various celebrities, including, as it turns out, Jules Feiffer, whose cartoons had appeared regularly in Playboy.

The man being interviewed was, without a doubt, the same man who had been sitting next to us at the Jonathan Richman concert.

Now, I wish I had said something to him. Maybe I could have even gotten a Feiffer original doodle out of it, of Jonathan Richman no less (though probably not). At the very least, I could have told him how much his Phantom Tollbooth illustrations meant to me, even if he didn't personally like them all that much himself.

And looking back, I suppose I also wish I had told Michael Keaton how phenomenal his performance in Night Shift had been.

But he must already know that, right?

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." Tune in Monday to see if I make it to episode 400. (Spoiler alert: I will.)

¹Actually, GTS #84 and #124 already fall into this category, but stay with me.

²Beetlejuice and Batman were still in his future.

³As recounted in GTS #16.

⁴Eventually, of course, that's exactly what happened.

2/9/26

Hello, and welcome to the 400th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One day in 2009, when I was still working at the Fox23 television station in Portland, Maine, our rarely used office loudspeaker crackled to life as our office manager announced: "All available employees, please gather in the open area outside the conference room."

Oh man. Impromptu, all-staff meetings are never good news. It's never: "Everybody take the rest of the day off." It's never: "Keg party!" It's never: "Free pony rides for everyone!" (Well, hardly ever.)

Once everyone had gathered, our office manager summoned our general manager, who came out of his office and began delivering a long, long, circuitous (and also long) speech about these tough economic times.

Oh man, I was thinking, my stomach clenched in nervous anticipation. Whatever this is, just get to it already.

He did not just get to it already. We were first subjected to nine and a half minutes of doom and gloom—clearly justification for whatever was coming next, which turned out to be this:

"And so," our GM said, "our parent company has come up with a way to keep us from having to lay anybody off. Everybody will now get the following days off: President's Day, Good Friday, the Friday before Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and Christmas Eve."

Huh, I tought. That's cool. But how are they saving money by giving us more holidays? Unless...

"These days off will be unpaid," he continued directly. "You are free to work on these days, if you'd like (gee, thanks!), but you will not be paid. Keep in mind that the station has to keep operating, so your department will need to plan out how its work will be done on those days, but they'll officially be unpaid days off. Are there any questions?"

The correct answer to "Are there any questions?" after an announcement like that is "No," but Teresa, head of promotions, said, "I have a question: Was cutting executive salaries ever discussed as a cost-saving measure?"

The GM paused for a moment before replying with a curt, sharp "No."¹

I was a department of one (website/social media). My plan? My entire department would just coincidentally not have any work on those days. The website would not be updated, and our social media presence would go dark. Oh well! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Extra days off were cool, since we had a pretty thin holiday schedule to begin with, and only two weeks vacation. It just would have been nice, if they were going to give us unpaid days off anyway, if they'd have let us pick what those days were.

The whole thing kind of terrified me because it didn't feel like a "final solution." It felt like a stopgap implemented in the hopes that the economy was going to turn around. And if it didn't, I had a feeling that some of us would be offered a whole bunch more unpaid days off, all in a row, forever.

Two years later, that's exactly what happened (to me).²

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹When layoffs did occur, two years later, Teresa was the first to go. Keep reading this secret to find out who was the second.

²Longtime readers with good memories already knew this.

2/11/26

Hello, and welcome to the 401st episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Maybe you remember this, maybe you don't, but back in the early '90s, when David Letterman was still doing his NBC show at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, he would occasionally call a woman named Meg Parsont, who worked in the Simon & Schuster Building across the street, often having objects delivered to her office for her to drop out her window onto the street below—like for instance Nerf balls, as in this segment right here, from July 30, 1991:

One of those Nerf balls, one that didn't go out the window that day, was signed by Meg and then given to me by Meg's colleague (and my dear friend) Katherine Stebbins. It has been in my possession for the past 35 years.

So yeah, I'm kind of a big deal.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/13/26

Hello, and welcome to the 402nd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

"Nice cloak," I said to a man outside the grocery store who was wearing a cloak and a wizard's hat. He thanked me for getting it right, and not calling it a cape, as people apparently had been doing all day. Later, as I was checking out, the cashier saw the same man go into the bathroom. "I like that guy's cape," she said.

"It's a cloak," I advised her. "He's very particular about that."

"Oh, is he?" she said, sounding a little skeptical, but when the guy came out of the bathroom, she said to him, "Nice cloak."

He was thrilled.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/16/26

Hello, and welcome to the 403rd episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I went down to the DMV¹ to renew my driver's license. When I got there, I took a ticket from the dispensing machine just inside the entrance. I looked down at my ticket, and up at the big board to determine just where I was in line.

The number on my ticket was 860.

The number on the big board was 095.

That's when the following frenzied internal monologue occurred in my head:

Holy shit! What the fuck? This is going to take hours! This is going to take all day! How is it even possible that so many people are waiting? This is crazy. This is bullshit. Bureaucracy is insane. I can't do this. I can't do this. I deeply feel I can't do this... Oh wait a minute. I'm holding my ticket upside-down.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹In Maine, it's actually the BMV, for Bureau of Motor Vehicles, but I figured everybody knows what the DMV is, and fewer people probably know what the BMV is, so it was quicker and easier just to call it the DMV. Of course, after this lengthy explanation, maybe I just could have spelled out "Bureau of Motor Vehicles" in my original post. Oh well. Nothing I can do about it now.

2/18/26

Hello, and welcome to the 404th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

One of Kate's colleagues had to have hernia surgery, and—since I was between jobs at the time—I took over his classes while he recovered. By request, I was really just marking time, vamping for a couple of weeks while Kate's colleague recovered. Nevertheless, there were some frustrations ("Book? What book?" "What assignment?" "What are you talking about?" "What do you mean by 'revision'? What's a revision?" "Is there another activity after this one? If not, can we leave?" etc.)

I oversaw two sections of the class, and in both, the students had to do a presentation in front of the class, in any format, on any subject.

In one section, the kids were admirably ambitious, crafting PowerPoint slide shows, showing off visual aids, and serving up serious (if sometimes a bit dry) academic speeches. As part of one presentation, a student, for reasons I've now forgotten, showed a clip from Game 7 of the 1984 NBA Championship between the Celtics and the Lakers. I told him I had watched that game live as it happened, and he gaped at me in astonishment. "Whoa," he said. "You were alive then?"

In the other section, every single person chose the exact same presentation format: With no preamble or concluding remarks, each of them showed a scene from the movie or television adaptation of a book they had supposedly read.

One guy's book was The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Why he picked this book was a complete mystery to me. He could have picked any book he wanted, and other people picked books by Stephen King and Harper Lee and Jack London—fairly easy reads all. This kid chose The House of the Dead, and for his presentation, showed a very long clip from a 1978 horror movie, House of the Dead (a.k.a. Alien Zone), which, it may surprise you to learn, is entirely unrelated to Dostoevsky's book, which focuses more on the life of convicts in a Siberian prison camp, and less on how the corpses in a particular mortuary died. The student did assert, however, that one scene, in which a madman strangles a woman with her own nylons, was "most like the book."

Since I was merely serving as a glorified placeholder, and since I had been specifically instructed not to grade or critique, I said nothing. But good god, man: Could you not have put in even the mildest effort?

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/20/26

Hello, and welcome to the 405th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When my older child was 18, he desperately wanted to build his own computer. So we got him a kit, and—together with his younger sibling, and a bit of kibitzing from mom and dad—he completely built his new computer from the circuit boards on up. I encourage you to watch the above 48-second video, a super-sped-up documentation of this all-day process, with a funky soundtrack to make the viewing experience more enjoyable.

When it was finished, the computer wouldn't turn on. We double-checked all the connections, made sure the electrical outlet was functioning properly, and re-secured the internal battery, but nothing worked. The whole thing turned out to be a very heavy, time-consuming, colossally disappointing brick.

That brick sat in the corner of our dining room for a solid year before we finally took it to a local computer place to have it looked over. They discovered pretty quickly that a single graphics card was in the wrong slot, the one and only issue. With that minor adjustment, the computer worked great.

(There might be a lesson in this anecdote, but if so, it eludes me.)

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

2/23/26

Hello, and welcome to the 406th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Most people probably don't have a favorite Martian moon, but I do. Let me tell you why.

The two moons of Mars are named after twins in Greek mythology. Not Castor and Pollux; the other ones. Not Romulus and Remus either. Romulus and Remus are from Roman mythology, sons of the Roman god of war, Mars. Mars is the counterpart to Greek mythology's god of war, Ares, who had twin sons of his own, Phobos and Deimos, who gave their names to Mars's two moons.

Anyway, my favorite is Phobos, and it has to do with a personal connection to that particular moon I formed as a child.

When I was ten years old, I discovered an error in the glossary of my fifth grade reader, a hardback collection of short stories and essays curated for the fifth grade's most advanced readers. (That's not a brag; it's just backstory.) The reader's glossary defined "Phobos" as "the outer and smaller of the two moons of Mars," when, as everybody knows, Phobos is the outer and larger of the two moons of Mars.¹

This next bit, I freely acknowledge, was spectacularly nerdy, but I wrote to the publisher to alert them to their mistake. On the advice of my mother, I cited two sources to back up my correction: the American Heritage Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary.²

Several months later, I heard back from the publisher, thanking me for spotting the error, and vowing to correct it in future editions. My name on the letter was spelled differently, I noted, from my name on the envelope.

Both spellings were wrong.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Okay not everybody knows that. The only reason I know it is because a student teacher gave us an assignment to find the definitions of our reader's glossary words without using the glossary. Then she quizzed us, using the glossary's definitions as the answer key. She marked my Phobos answer as wrong, and I immediately flagged the discrepancy.

²This was old-school, pre-internet. I had to go to the library to copy down the OED definition by hand.

2/25/26

Hello, and welcome to the 407th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

We're getting a little meta today, folks, because today's secret is a secret about Greg Tulonen Secrets. Huzzah!

I've gotten a lot of questions and comments about my header images, ever since I moved away from boring old selfies and towards themed or on-point pictures. I can tell you that they are not AI-generated. They're the result of painstaking (and sometimes embarrassingly amateurish) Photoshop editing. Monday's image was more complicated than most, and I'm going to briefly walk you through it.

I already had the spacesuit, you see, having purchased it in 2014 in preparation for a web series project called Banky Reed and the Passage to the Edge of Space, which never came to fruition (or, at least, it hasn't come to fruition yet).

This had been in my closet for twelve years (the suit, not the man wearing it), still in the packaging. When I got it out for this photo, I discovered that it was far too small for me, despite the packaging's confident assertion that "one size fits all." So, I cut the legs off at the thighs, turning it into a kind-of spacesuit romper. (I could show you a picture of what I looked like wearing the spacesuit romper but... I'm not going to.) For the header image, I would only be photographing my head and torso, so it was fine. Everything was fine.

Next, I needed a helmet. (The "helmet" that had come with the suit above was soft and fake and stupid-looking.) I found this one, which was personalizable, in that I could order any name I wanted to be printed on the bottom. I chose "CMDR. TULONEN."¹

The helmet also claimed to be "one size fits all," but... how do I put this? You see, my head? My head is kind of its own... situation.

When the "one size fits all" helmet arrived, I discovered that, while I could technically get it onto my head, it wasn't exactly one size fits all.

Like the spacesuit jumper, this was ridiculous, but unlike the spacesuit jumper, it was not going to work for the photo. I thought about trying to find another helmet somewhere, but I feared that, given my whole head situation, I would just be setting myself up for a series of heady disappointments.

So, I performed a little surgery on the back of the helmet, which would not be showing in the photo, to give my head some room to breathe (literally). As I understand it, this modification is not recommended for actual spacewalks, but for a front-facing photo shoot, if would be fine. Everything was fine.

The elements mostly in place, I stuck a book light inside the helmet to light my face, and a flashlight behind my hand to give it some definition, and I took this picture of myself inside a darkened closet. Note the barely visible coat hangers on the right, and the piece of clothing draped in front of my elbow.

click to enlarge

From there, it was just a matter of pulling the image into Photoshop and adding some background elements, which went a little something like this (though it took much, much longer):

So, there you have it. That's how babies are made.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Brief aside for a very quick private joke for Chad Anderson (and maybe John Thomas): Any thoughts about what rank and name I could have chosen? End aside.

2/27/26

Hello, and welcome to the 408th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Shortly before I arrived at Middlebury College in the fall of 1987, College President Olin Robison created a drug task force in response to some high-profile cocaine incidents on campus—most notably the arrest of former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro's son John for selling coke to an undercover officer.

As part of our orientation, all freshmen were required to attend a task force-hosted screening of a video testimonial recorded by an '85 Middlebury graduate named Nick.¹ Nick, as part of his mandatory community service, relayed to the camera his descent into addiction while he was a student.

Right off the bat, Nick was not a sympathetic or compelling presence. He came across as rich and entitled, and he kept talking about his drug abuse as a terrible thing that had happened to him, taking little ownership of the role he had played in his own troubles.

Recounting one "low point" in his journey, he described coming across his mother late one night in the (undoubtedly luxurious) family kitchen. She was sitting on the kitchen counter in sweat pants and a t-shirt, eating ice cream out of the container. Nick talked about this scene as if it were the most horrifying image ever to grace his retinas. "That is not my mother," he assured us. (It turned out she was worried about his drug abuse.)

The most memorable part of the video was when Nick spoke of his personal rock bottom: out of cash in Boston, begging a drug dealer on the street for a free bump. "There I was," Nick blubbered, "literally on my knees on the sidewalk, pleading with this scum—this black scum—for drugs."

It's not often you actually hear an audience gasp, but the audience literally gasped at that. Any sympathy Nick may have cultivated (which was not much) scuttled out of the theater like a cockroach in the light. This was not a "there but for the grace of God" scenario. This was a racist scumbag who'd done bad things and gotten caught.

(I later learned that future screenings of Nick's video omitted the "black scum" remark.)

Remember: This was 1987, the height of the "Just Say No" campaign. Events like this one and many others geared us up to expect wanton dens of miscreancy wherever we ventured. But the truth is, I never once saw cocaine at Middlebury. I'm sure it was around, but it was never around me, so I never once had an opportunity to "just say no" (to cocaine, anyway). The only potentially hard drug-related scene I ever witnessed was a guy washing out a syringe in the bathroom sink. "Don't be afraid," he told me, sounding extremely stoned. "It can be your friend too."

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹I still remember his last name, but I'm not going to share it here.

3/2/26

Hello, and welcome to the 409th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

When I was a kid, adults used to go to each other's houses all the time, to share a meal, watch a game, or just hang out. With no internet or social media, socializing was an on-the-ground, in-person activity. This still happens, of course, but it seems different, somehow. Not as spontaneous. Maybe I've just aged out.

Being raised by a single mom, I usually accompanied her on these visits. I loved it. I loved hanging out with adults, laughing at adult jokes, and participating in adult conversations. But sometimes, the adults wanted private, adults-only talk, and didn't necessarily desire the conversational contributions of a six-year-old.¹

On one such visit, to the apartment of my mom's friend Chuck, I was given a complicated puzzle, with irregularly shaped pieces that fit together in exactly one way to form a perfect cube. This was a fairly complex challenge, and the idea was that it would keep me occupied for a good long while while Chuck and my mom talked privately. Chuck promised me a prize if I could finish it, which seemed unlikely.

Except, my six-year-old brain, unfettered by worldly worries and outfitted with a full fleet of strapping young neurons, conquered the puzzle in about five minutes flat. I took the completed cube into the room where the adults were talking, and they were quite surprised (and probably a little irritated). Chuck gifted me with his Groucho Marx nose glasses, which was just about the greatest thing I had ever been given.

I loved my Groucho Marx nose glasses, and I was devastated when they broke just a few weeks later.

Which brings us to an unusual character trait I had as a child: Due to shame or embarrassment or a desire for privacy, I often did not want to ask for something I wanted, so instead, I'd ask for an adjacent thing that would give me access to the object of my desire. For example, I might be looking for cilantro in the grocery store, but for whatever neurotic reason, I don't want to admit that I'm looking for cilantro, so I'll ask an employee where the parsley is, figuring I'll find cilantro near that. I know this makes no sense.²

I badly wanted a new pair of Groucho Marx nose glasses, but I did not want to admit either to having broken my old pair or to wanting a new pair. So for Christmas 1975, the number one item on my wish list was a brand-new, heavily advertised toy from Kenner: Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces.

Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces was a bald, creepy-looking half-man doll who came with an accessory kit full of facial accoutrements: wigs, sideburns, beards, eyebrows, moustaches, various noses and chins, scars, warts, alternate eyes, eyeglasses, sunglasses, an eye patch, a mask, a head bandage, teeth, and on and on. He came equipped with a non-toxic glue stick which ran out very quickly, but before it did, could be used to temporarily stick the pieces in various combinations to the doll's head. The results were... unsettling (and not just a little racist).

But the truth was (and I can admit this now, so that's progress), despite my feigned enthusiasm, I wasn't really all that interested in Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces. What I really wanted were the eyebrows, glasses, fake nose, and moustache—with which, I reasoned, I could assemble a replacement pair of Groucho Marx nose glasses.

You don't understand. That's okay. Neither do I. A crucial line in my favorite movie, Miller's Crossing, is spoken to the protagonist: "You always take the long way around to get what you want." Boy oh boy, does that line resonate with me!

On Christmas Day 1975, I was delighted to receive Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces, but I was soon crushed to learn that Hugo's head and facial accoutrements were much smaller than my own head and facial features. So, there would be no assembling of a replacement pair of Groucho Marx nose glasses for me.

Look, I don't know what to tell you, except that my life would probably be a lot easier if I weren't so damned weird.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Even one as bright and charming as I.

²And yes, I also know that this is an example from my adulthood.

3/4/26

Hello, and welcome to the 410th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Late one spring afternoon, I found myself in a hotel room in Manhattan with an assortment of guys, a few of whom I knew, but a bunch I'd never met before. This was the kickoff to the bachelor party for my buddy Doug.¹ Doug's best man (a guy I'd never met or even heard of, despite having known Doug for almost twelve years) had organized the whole thing, requesting five hundred dollars (each) from everybody in the room (except Doug) to help pay for it, and I was like, Damn! Five hundred dollars? What's gonna happen at this bachelor party? Is David Copperfield gonna perform or what?

One of the guys I didn't know pulled out his laptop. This was the late '90s. WiFi, and the internet itself, were still in their infancy. Streaming video existed, but only for very short clips. The guy pulled up one of those clips, which was of a woman having sex with a Dalmation (something I could have gone my whole life without seeing), prompting our friend Jay to remark, "This is the nerdiest bachelor party ever." Little did we know that online porn was on its way to becoming one of the most lucrative industries on the planet.²

The best man (I've forgotten his name, so let's just call him "BM") held up the fat stack of cash (multiple thousands of dollars) he had collected from all of us, and announced that our money was going towards a live sex show, which would be performed by two women, in that very room, any minute now.

Uh oh.

The prospect of a live sex show did not excite me, or forge a phallic bond with the other men in the room. It just made me feel trepidatious and lonely and sad. A live sex show? How did we get here? If I were, for some reason, tasked with procuring a live, in-person sex show for a bachelor party, I wouldn't have the slightest idea where to start. Nor would I want to.³

The phone rang. BM answered it, murmured something into the receiver, and hung up. "They're here," he said, and left the room to collect the sex workers in the lobby.

He was gone for a very, very long time.

What do you talk about, with a mixed group of friends and strangers, all sitting in a hotel room, waiting for two sex workers to enter and perform sex acts upon each other in front of you? Not much, as it turns out. There was some light, nervous chatter and a few throats clearing, but otherwise all was quiet, and the minutes ticked by—about forty-five minutes, give or take. I began to wonder if BM had taken the thousands of dollars we had given him and run off with the two sex workers to Mexico to see a David Copperfield show.

Finally, BM returned, sex-workerless. "I sent them away," he told us. "They were way too ugly. When I set this up, I asked for two good-looking white women, and these two were fat and ugly and black. They were so disgusting. So, I sent them away."

I felt a mixture of relief and revulsion at his explanation, while others wanted to know what had taken so long. "I was arguing with their bodyguard," BM said. "He wanted the money and I told him no way. His girls were too ugly."

Now I was imagining a long, escalating contretemps occurring in the vast lobby of this fancy hotel between BM and a big, burly bodyguard accompanied by two sex workers. What a scene that must have been, and I can't tell you how glad I was that I wasn't there for it.

The bachelor party had gotten off to an awkward, dispiriting start. BM hadn't planned anything besides the sex show. No food, no other entertainment, not even any drinks. But holding up the wad of cash he'd obtained from us and withheld from the sex workers, he declared, "Let's go to a strip club! Lap dances are on me!" Well, technically, lap dances would be on all of us. (Pun intended?)⁴

Although I had never been in a strip club, the idea was less unsettling to me than a live sex show in a hotel room. I mean, strip clubs are actual licensed entities, with owners and managers and paychecks and W2 forms. Some strippers even have unions. I had no particular desire to spend time in a strip club, because I suspected the employees viewed the patrons with a mixture of boredom and disdain, and I didn't want to be one of those guys, ogling the naked ladies, even though that would be exactly what I was supposed to be doing, under the circumstances.

Inside the strip club, BM, our cash in hand, was making it rain like a boss, "gifting" lapdances to everyone in our party, and pouring very expensive drinks down Doug's throat. Unbidden, he sent me over a topless blonde, who danced desultorily in front of me for a few minutes, her nipples inches from my face. I can't say it was a terribly sensual experience (for either of us), and I declined all further lapdances BM offered me after that. I noticed that some of the other lapdances being handed out were more... passively participatory (if that makes any sense) than mine had been, but I was fine being done.

After a couple of hours, Doug was deeply incapacitated by alcohol, and it was time for the party to break up. BM and I walked Doug back to the hotel. It had only taken us ten minutes to get to the strip club, but it took half an hour to guide a drunken Doug back. The difference was staggering.⁵

Back at the hotel, Doug paused in the middle of the lobby, grimly shook his head, and said, "Very bad." Then he vomited about a hundred and four dollars worth of alcohol onto the lobby floor.

That's when BM—the guy who had organized the whole evening, the guy who had bought Doug all those drinks, the guy who was the best goddamned man, for crying out loud—abandoned us, darting away like a rat through a drainpipe. He lunged into an elevator and was gone.

Doug was in no shape to deal with this on his own, so I summoned a concierge to alert him to the mess, and I got Doug upstairs and into a bed with a bucket by his side. I never saw BM again.⁶

So, after all that, I guess what I'm trying to say is—and Doug, if you're reading this, please know that I say it with all the love in my heart—that BM guy? He was a bit of a shit.⁷

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Not his real name. On the advice of counsel, names have been anonymized, though identities will be obvious to some.

²Every dog has its day, I suppose.

³That is not intended as a moral judgment on sex workers. It's just that it's impossible to confirm true consent in an industry that conducts its business in darkness, and that squicks me out.

⁴You can assume all my puns are intended.

⁵See Footnote 4.

⁶Well, except at the wedding.

⁷See Footnote 4.

3/6/26

Hello, and welcome to the 411th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

I have decided that I'm finally old enough to wear a fedora without looking like a douche.¹ If you disagree, please, please, please, for the love of god, please consider letting me know down in the comments, and then don't.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Though, admittedly, photoshopping myself into a black-and-white, vaguely noirish photograph might do the trick.

3/9/26

Hello, and welcome to the 412th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

As I've mentioned once or twice,¹ in the early 2010s, I wrote for and acted in the award-winning supernatural-mystery web series, Ragged Isle.

One night, way back in July 2010, when the show was still just words in a script, we scheduled a season-one table read with the entire cast, after hours at the FOX23 TV station, where Ragged Isle's director Barry Dodd and I both worked. Rather than go home after work and come back again, I hung around town for the afternoon and took in a movie.²

After the movie, I thought I'd grab some dinner, but when I came out of the theater, the sky was a weird, dark green color, and fierce-looking clouds hurtled across the sky the way they do in time-lapse photography, only this was real-time. Nearby thunder rumbled ominously, and the air smelled like raw electricity. I'd never experienced anything like it, but I understood at once that this was tornado weather.

I hustled back to the office to wait for the rest of the Ragged Isle gang. While I waited, I turned on a local news station.³

The news team was covering the storm with a breathless intensity you'd think would be reserved for an impending apocalypse. "Do not go outside," the broadcaster grimly advised. "If you're watching me right now, turn off the TV and go into your basement. If you don't have a basement, lie down in a ditch near your home and cover yourself with a blanket."⁴

Continuing directly, he went on: "Now, on your screen right now, it says to send your weather photos to our Facebook page. I can't emphasize this enough: Please do not do that. It's far too dangerous. This is the real thing, people."

I knew the Ragged Isle actors were on their way, or soon would be, but I didn't have a way to reach any of them. I also knew that Barry and his wife (Ragged Isle writer-producer Karen Dodd) would be coming from Gorham, and it seemed as though Gorham was at the heart of the storm. The meteorologist on TV was speaking with the intensity of a battle correspondent. "Gorham is like a war zone!" he shouted. "Buildings have collapsed, lines are down, Route 202 is closed. Route 4 is closed. Route 115 is closed. If you live in Gorham, do not go outside! I couldn't be more serious. Stay home!"

Well, damn. These really were the end times, it seemed. I didn't have a cellphone back then, but Barry did, so I DMed him from my computer, just to check in.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"I'm fine," Barry promptly replied. "We're on our way."⁵

"News 13 says Gorham's a war zone. Route 115 is closed."

"We're on 115 now."

"Oh."

Based on what was unfolding on TV, I figured that may well have been the last exchange I would ever have with Barry, but he and Karen arrived fifteen minutes later, wet and happy.⁶

Over the next couple of hours every single one of the actors arrived, many of them quite late due to the weather. This was my first time meeting many of them.⁷

I was pretty nervous. These were scripts we'd lived with and sweated over for months, and I had pretty specific ideas about how each of the roles should be played. I even had some literally impossible casting ideas, like "a young Peter Falk" and "Burgess Meredith" and "Betty White," none of whom was really available.⁸

But once the actors began speaking their lines, all of that nervousness went away. All of them made their characters their own. It was kind of thrilling. When we got to the end to the season, Barry, who'd been reading the stage directions, actually became too choked up to continue.

I knew how he felt.

Less than a year later, on March 9, 2011—fifteen years ago today, as it happens—the first episode of Ragged Isle was unleashed upon the world. This episode right here:

Happy 15th anniversary, Ragged Isle!

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹Or, okay, four times.

²Inception, if you must know.

³Not our own, since we didn't produce our own news.

⁴Emphasis mine, and not an exaggeration. That's word-for-word verbatim what he said.

⁵I can't tell you how jarring the contrast was between the overwrought alarm of the newscasters and the calmness of Barry's reply.

⁶It may seem like I'm giving the news crew a bit of a hard time for their histrionics, and I am, but in all fairness, the National Weather Service later called this "one of the biggest tornado outbreaks in Maine history."

⁷"He's so handsome!" I giddily whispered to Barry about our lead actor, Ian Carlsen. "He looks like Bon Jovi!"

⁸Actually, Betty White might have done it, if we'd asked.

3/11/26

Hello, and welcome to the 413th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Chad Anderson and I got an apartment together in New York City in August of 1992. It was an unseasonably cool summer that year, rarely rising above 90 degrees in the city, and dubbed "The Summer That Wasn't" by the National Weather Service.¹

The spring of 1993 was truly lovely. Here we are—Andy, Kate, Chad, and I—playing Monopoly on the roof of our apartment building,² on May 8, 1993.

This is one of my favorite photographs from my life ever taken.

The summer of 1993, however, was brutal, with intense, record-breaking heatwaves and sky-high humidity. It was one of the hottest summers in the city's history, and it boasted, for the first time since 1948, three consecutive days with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.

In our fifth-floor walkup apartment, the heat was like a third roommate who didn't pay rent. It was overbearing, oppressive, inescapable. Chad and I would (and I warn you, this is not a pretty mental image) sit on our sofa (which wasn't a bed) in our underwear, holding wet facecloths filled with ice cubes to our foreheads.³

One Saturday morning, Chad stood up, his sweaty skin briefly resisting its forced separation from the sofa. "Fuck it" he shouted. "We're going to get air conditioners!"

We dressed, as lightly as we were able, and walked to the Circuit City around the corner,⁴ but Circuit City was completely sold out of air conditioners, and the employees there seemed surprised that we'd thought things would be any different.

"When are you getting more in?" asked Chad.

"There's a truck coming in this afternoon, but..."

"But what?" I said.

"They're stopping at our Upper West Side location first, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're cleaned out before they get here."

"Aren't they supposed to drop off a set number of units and that location," said Chad, "and a set number of units at this location?"

"They're supposed to, but if there are enough customers up there waiting to buy, they may not hold anything back."

"So, we should head up there," I said.

"I would recommend buying them here, and heading up there with your receipts. They might sell out before you get there. Those units may not even make it into the store."

So, that's what we did. It required a leap of faith, but that's what we did. We each bought an air conditioner, sight unseen, and, receipts in hand, we took the train up to the Circuit City on the Upper West Side.

There was a throng gathered on the sidewalk outside the Upper West Side Circuit City, as if Nirvana were performing an impromptu concert on the roof, except every single person in this throng was clutching a receipt for an air conditioner, and everybody looked surly.

The truck wasn't due for another hour.

We stood on that hot sidewalk, sweating and fretting, as more and more people holding air conditioner receipts joined us, and it was beginning to seem like there might be more people waiting on the sidewalk than there would be air conditioners in the truck.

The crowd was getting surlier.

The truck arrived at last, and when the roll-up door rolled up, we beheld beautiful, towering stacks of brand-new air conditioners, still in their boxes. The crowd advanced, like movie zombies closing in on the heroes. The truck driver held up a placating hand. "Hold on," he said. "Hold on." He looked at the top box on the stack closest to him. "Who here has a receipt for a Hitachi 200, ten thousand BTUs?"

Hands shot up, and the driver started checking receipts. He distributed air conditioners to confirmed purchasers, like a fruitmonger tossing watermelons into the crowd, as Chad and I waited for him to call out our brand, the Goldstar 5050 BTU.

Our model got called near the end, when the truck was nearly stripped clean, almost down to the lug nuts, and it was fortunate that we hadn't waited for the truck to get to the Circuit City near our apartment, because the damned thing would have arrived empty, if it arrived at all.

Chad and I and our air conditioners made our way back to our apartment, where we spent the next hour sweating profusely through the process of installing air conditions exactly as directed by the owner's manual, with wall-mounted brackets holding the units securely in place.⁵ When we were finished, we turned them both on, and over the next hour or so, we found true peace, cool and refreshing, for the first time that summer.

For the rest of my time in New York, no summer was as hot as it was in 1993, but no matter how hot it got, I still had my trusty Goldstar 5050. Since I left New York in 1997, temperatures in the city have risen, with 2023 being the second hottest year or record, and 2024 being the hottest.

Hey, maybe there's something to this climate change thing after all.⁶

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹The most accepted explanation for the unusually cool weather was the June 14, 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines. The volcanic ash that was spewed into the atmosphere circumnavigated the globe and caused a decrease in solar warming into the following year.

²The same rooftop on which our guests gathered at our housewarming party, as chronicled in GTS #312.

³I did warn you.

⁴Yes, the same Circuit City mentioned in GTS #312, at which Chad had purchased the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack for our housewarming party.

⁵When we each got our own apartment the following year, Chad called me and asked if I had bothered with the wall-mounted bracket this time. I hadn't, and neither had he.

⁶Which certainly isn't helped by all the air conditioners.

3/13/26

Hello, and welcome to the 414th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."

Way back when, I discussed my ability to make spectacular catches of falling objects, as long as nobody was watching. Another factor in that skill is the lack of time to think. When relying on reflexes alone, when there's no time to panic, I'm as agile as a cheetah.¹

One winter day, many years ago, a storm hit the Lewiston-Auburn area with the force of an occupying army. My work made the rare decision to send everybody home, which was good, but they were sending us all out right into the heart of the storm, which was maybe not so great.

Our house was not very far from work, but my route home took me up Goff Hill in Auburn. If you're at all familiar with Auburn, Maine, you probably already know that Goff Hill is the highest and steepest vehicular hill in town, and Court Street, which runs through the center of downtown Auburn, leads straight up it.

So, there I was, making my way on Court Street up Goff Hill. The road was slippery, but I was making slow and steady progress. As I neared the first crest, however, the car came to an abrupt stop, its wheels still spinning furiously, but achieving no forward momentum. Then it began to slide backwards, down Goff hill. I tried the brake and then the gas pedal, but neither slowed my backwards descent. In the rearview, I could see more cars moving up Goff Hill, heading directly into my unintentional trajectory.

The next few seconds exist in my head as hyperfocused, super-slo-mo, silent footage, as I spun the steering wheel sharply to the left, the car's wheels responding, but failing to find purchase, carrying on with their persistent vehicular glissade. My car was sideways across the street now, and I could see through the driver's side window my steady downward advancement towards the ascending cars. Without pause, I kept turning the steering wheel, hand over hand, as fast as I could manage, the car continuing its wide, near-360-degree arc until it was pointed directly towards Lake Street, a slightly less steep side street branching off from the right side of Court.

I gunned the engine and hurtled forward onto Lake, my tires finally finding a surface they could hold onto, and I fishtailed my way off Court Street entirely. My heart continued to race as I brought the car under control and slowed it to a very safe speed. I was home in a matter of minutes, and upon reflection, in which there'd been no time to indulge before then, I realized that my backwards slide, rapid turn, and escape off Court probably looked pretty spectacular from the outside, the kind of maneuver celebrated stuntman Hal Needham would have concocted for a Burt Reynolds movie—the difference being, Hal Needham could have executed that move over and over again upon demand. As for me, I was staggeringly lucky to have pulled it off once, and almost certainly would never have been able to repeat it, due to my nimbleness only revealing itself when I don't have time to think.

Which is why I stopped driving up Goff Hill in bad weather after that.

This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." We'll see you next time.

¹A somewhat clumsy cheetah, but still.