My Library

There was a somewhat liberating fallout from all the negative and positive gossip, at least in my mind. It freed me to be what I wanted to be at any given time -- where hereto I had forced myself to conform to respectable conventional standards. I luxuriated in this new-found freedom of alternating identities. And there was one great and unexpected reward to this change in dressing style. Because of my "costumes," I suddenly found myself easily accepted into a social substrata which had mostly rejected me before. Which is to say, into the realms of New York ARTISTS -- and most of whom tend to dress and act radically anyway. In any event, the first part of the New Age Wave was in full progress, and to be even a small part of it meant that one could not wear conventional clothes which the "tuned in" New Agers had "dropped out of." But even within this new-found "freedom," I felt that the negative, ridiculous gossip was designed to drive me out of the ASPR -- and terminally out of parapsychology itself. So Zelda and Ruth helped me trace back some of the gossip to its original source. In those instances where we succeeded, a parapsychologist was often found, and on some occasions other psychics. My calendar for 1972 shows that I worked at the ASPR only ten days during May.