if you're interested you can find my winamp skins and ascii/ansi/underground art here at - [link]

Thought i'd share a quote of a carl jung quote from a essay by Katherine Yurica - How Art Creates the Artist { [link] } its well worth reading; you could say its enlightening and essential reading for the tortured/starving artist.

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There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire. It is as though each of us were endowed at birth with a certain capital of energy. The strongest force in our make-up will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing of value can come of it. In this way the creative force can drain the human impulses to such a degree that the personal ego must develop all sorts of bad qualities...in order to maintain the spark of life and to keep itself from being wholly bereft...[these negatives] of artists resembles that of illegitimate or neglected children who from their tenderest years must protect themselves from the destructive influence of people who have no love to give them--who develop bad qualities for that very purpose and later maintain an invincible egocentrism by remaining all their lives infantile and helpless or by actively offending against the moral code or the law. How can we doubt that it is his art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life? These are nothing but the regrettable results of the fact that he is an artist--that is to say, a man [or woman] who from his very birth has been called to a greater task than the ordinary mortal. A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.

Interviewer:I think that the nighttime is the most creative moment.

Gen:Yes, that's because all the stupid people are asleep and they don't blanket you with their negative energy. You see, round about eight or nine o'clock you start to feel deadened because they're all getting up and rushing around generating all this useless energy. All the stupid people going to work and then in the evening about five or six o'clock, they all come home and start to watch the television, then it gets a bit better, you feel more (the creative people) start to feel better. And as they are all going to sleep around eleven o'clock, you start to get ideas. Midnight till four they're all fast asleep and you get really good ideas. I think it's just the blanket of their negative energy eating up all the positive energy in the daytime. That's why the nighttime's the best time to work. So it's alright to sleep in late, you know, go to bed late and stay asleep in the morning because you can't do anything anyway, because all the stupid people are rushing about and getting in the way.

" Even when we are sharpened and quickened intellectually by argument, by discussion, by reading, this does not actually bring about that quality of sensitivity. And you know all those people who are erudite, who read, who theorize, who can discuss brilliantly, are extraordinarily dull people. So I think sensitivity, which destroys mediocrity, is very important to understand. Because most of us are becoming, I am afraid, more mediocre. We are not using that word in any derogative sense at all, but merely observing the fact of mediocrity in the sense of being average, fairly well educated, earning a livelihood and perhaps capable of clever discussion; but this leaves us still bourgeois, mediocre, not only in our attitudes but in our activities. "

~Jiddu

" Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate. "

unsourced taoist quote.