Glycerine
I believe I wrote the lyrics to Glycerine in a toxicology class at Berkshire Community College in the Fall of 1985. I wrote about this later in an art class on FB. Here is what I put in that placeholder report I just asked Google Gemini to correct for me:
I made a list of things that gave me affirmation as part of a plan to shift my mind from negative to positive thinking. Everyone should do this because I found that there were a lot of very positive things I had forgotten, and they really improved my perspective!
- Michaels
One of the things I had forgotten was that I used to be able to draw eyes very well with a pen in community college. This was all because of a young lady I was unrequitedly stalking, who, after I decided to become obsessed with her, I found out had amazing eyes!
- Michaels
A Berkshire Community College drawing course I took for landscape architecture credits gave me the muscle memory I needed. We practiced drawing self-portraits from a mirror over and over using rectangular charcoal sticks and large, squishy gray erasers that were like putty.
I bought a pen with about 12 colors somewhere, like the one in this photo, which only has 10. It must have been during one of the environmental science classes I took and then dropped out of in my last aborted semester. This was after working to remove aquatic weeds from a lake in Connecticut with Phil Hooker at the end of the previous spring semester. I drew some eyes, and with all the weird colors, they looked kind of freaky and wild, yet really pretty. They accidentally came out as a girl's eyes—I was never quite sure which they would be—so I drew a girl's hair and face, and it reminded me of an artist who worked in the BCC administration office named Gail.
We had been lab partners in one of the environmental science courses that had a weekly laboratory day, maybe it was water quality. I remember we had to grab white lab rats out of a cage by their tails.
When we were putting the lids on the Petri dishes of cultures we were trying to grow in the environmental science labs, we'd rub glycerine around the edges to seal them airtight. It makes this beautiful, sweet-sounding scraping noise when you rub the two pieces of glass together.
Doug and Connie were a couple who were also art students taking some environmental science courses at BCC. For one semester, we hung out together at lunch in the cafeteria.
I had broken my nose playing pick-up basketball in the gym when Henry, who was an English major taking some environmental science courses, accidentally hit me in the face with his elbow during a rebound. Doug and Connie joked at lunch that they thought Gail had broken my nose (which gave me bruised eyes) because I had tried to get fresh with her!
I hadn't; I don't recall ever touching her. She had really good taste, though—she looked like a 40-year-old fashion model, and I was awed and flattered just by hanging out with her at lunch. But as you might see, saying that just doesn't work as a line in a poem.
When Dave and I got to know Henry and his lab partner, Kris, from our mutual chemistry course, Dave became friends with Kris and said Kris was Gene Simmons's son!
So, as my tape recorder recorded the class, I wrote a little poem inspired by the feeling of the drawing. I later mailed it on the same page as the drawing to a close friend named Dave, who was living near UMass Amherst.
Dave later told me he put the letter on his refrigerator, and at a party, everyone who saw the drawing said they really liked it.
And I believe the poem became the lyrics to a song most of you have heard.
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