2003-05-14 - 6:23 p.m.

For those of you who have stayed awake long enough to care, I�m no longer taking legal action against a certain well-known corporo-behemoth that hawks overpriced toiletries onto the stinking bovine hordes that we call the general public. Firstly, the scenes in court would be like watching the result of a huge war-mongering super power hurling the full power of its deathly arsenal against a defenceless, third world nation and butchering its population, though any modern day examples of this escape me for now. Secondly, it seems that blatantly copying someone�s (already published) idea and using it in the lamest ad campaign since Moses is actually a perfectly legal thing to do!

That�s right, kids! Want a career in advertising or PR? Just sit back, read as much as you can by people with actual imaginations and ideas, and then simply change a tiny detail (let�s say, for the sake of argument, �a word�) and pass it off as your own! Then you can look good to your bloated, arse-burger munching bosses, sit back into your vapid little scumfucking existence, safe in the knowledge that you�re an untouchable, plundering little jizzmaggot even though anyone with a micron of depth or integrity wouldn�t piss on you if you were on fire. But you�ll never know, or care, because real people are there to keep you in expensive haircuts, and doubt and self-examination are as alien a concept to you as originality and risk, you chuffing parasitic tragedies of human existence.

Not that I�m bitter, natch.

Unable to afford legal advice, I had to beg a solicitor friend�s trainee to research the matter for me on her lunch hour, and apparently unless they actually steal exact text, then they can run with the idea, reap the rewards and order themselves another set of, oh, I don�t know, fucking gold-spun bed sheets on the proceeds. And. You. Can. Do. Nothing. I even called their press office, in the stupid na�ve hope of just having a basic human conversation about it. Obviously the smug braying sow at the other end of the phone thought I was some crank and told me to �put it in a letter� and that she�d be �very interested to read it� and �by the way, You. Can. Do. Nothing.�

Creativity is dead. There is no point to it any more. Sure, you can do your little projects and write your stories and make your music and take your photographs and draw and design and tell the story of The Roman Empire via the medium of interpretive dance in a leotard in the street, but as soon as you stick your head above the bunker, as soon as you try to gain exposure, or draw attention to what you�re doing, or have any kind of small ambition beyond amusing yourself and your friends, the system will rip it from you, spawn a million soulless versions overnight, feed it into the unthinking, ravenous maws of its brain-dead consumer base and say �thanks very much, that�s our idea now � here�s a shiny button to commemorate your life�s work, now piss off and die�.

I wish that rogue advertising employees were conducting a terrorist campaign and that thermo-nuclear death was happening in specific �creative� departments in Soho and Madison Avenue. FUCKERS.

Really, I'm fine.