I'm skipping town this evening. Cramming a big heap of comfortable tracksuit pants into the back of the car and going away to write.

Obviously I will take a laptop, but I will not take series one through to seven of The West Wing.

I will not take Scrubs. Or Sports Night. Or Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. I will not take Press Gang series one through to four.

I will take possibly a nice fountain pen and a diary and a laptop and tracksuit pants. And possibly some books, but nothing too interesting. Boring books. I will take boring books.

I will be going for strictly regimented walks along the beach, and I will be drinking cups of tea only when I am two paragraphs into whatever it is I am writing (the prospect that I might write two paragraphs is almost unbearably delicious). Anthony Lane can do it, so can I.

Meanwhile, if anyone is remotely as jaded as I am about the state of the media at the moment, keep your eye on this. The idea is, it's people-driven journalism. We tell them what to write about. It's actual democracy!

So I'm going to visit the Standing There Productions baby today.

When we shot our short film, I Could Be Anybody , we asked some friends to come and do the shagging scene.

They happily obliged and nine months later... well, let's just say this could quite possibly be Standing There Productions' greatest production yet.

His name is Jasper and I already like him even though I haven't been properly introduced. He is unlike any of the other Standing There Productions in that he:

* Is more than two hours long
* Is not verbose and inclined towards political debate
* Has a strong story arc
* Has government funding (actually this is possibly untrue, but it makes the point to all those government arts funding bodies reading this that their absence has been noticed)

And of course he is adorable and perfectly formed.

My internet is down again today because of the wind blowing over a whole lot of (internet towers? phone lines? ADSL trees?)... I dunno. As a result, nerds all over the country are crammed onto the dial-up system and several emails and posts on this here website have been snatched from the screen, only to be replaced by infuriating messages about SYSTEM FAILURE and so on.

So anyway my point is the internet had better start behaving itself. That is all.

So there's a reason I've been missing, apart from the internet being down and the sun being out.

I've been missing because I've been uninspired. When the newspapers are full of this, this and this, it's very easy to think you're living in some kind of darkly comic novel.

Honestly, there's a bunch of blokes failing to recall whether they raped and killed a woman and took photographs of it, there are two political leaders (from either side of the vast political spectrum) claiming that migrants should sit an exam in English language* and Australian history, and one of the most watched "journalists" in the country is going to court over a child from a region that Australia has been trying to pretend doesn't even exist.

How genuinely dysfunctional.

So anyway, for once in my life I decided this evening that I had to disengage. I needed to not think about politics, or the media, or thugs, or the fact that John Howard wants people to learn about Australian history (which incidentally I thought we weren't supposed to remember) and then of course there's the fact that the opposition leader has put himself in the almost impossible position of being legitimately accused of racism by Amanda Vanstone.

So, in order to disengage, I decided to go and see a very brainless but potentially enjoyable film, the new Jack Black film.

Anyway, half way through, a group of people turned around to ask the couple behind them to please remove their feet from the backs of their seats.

So the people who were asked to take their feet off the seats told the other people to (and I'm editing this for all the under twelves) shut up, go away, leave them alone, and "Go home" because "You're not in China anymore, mate".

This impressive display demonstrated a fine understanding of Australian history (Chinese history not being relevant in Australia until the gold rush), a fantastic command of the language (although sadly not the use of the word "dinkum"), and even a reference to the "essential Australian value" of mateship ("You're not in China anymore, mate").

There was then a stand up screeching monologue wherein it was determined that some of the people in the cinema were "Asians" and that the two loud-shouty-type-racist-people "had paid good money" to be sitting in the film racially vilifying other persons. All of this screaming was happening during Jack Black's leaping around doing accents in tight lycra pants, and it resulted eventually in an almost-physical fight.

Since my disengaging tactic hadn't worked thus far, I decided to alert the very startled (twelve-year-old) manager to what was going on, and to his credit he did attempt to stop the madness, with the result that the loud shouting (from the non-Asian contingent) continued until after the movie. When I left, the manager was offering to arrange a safety escort (presumably in order to protect the Asians on their way back home to China).

Thankfully, I can report that when the lights came up, the entire cinema turned to the couple of - what's the fair dinkum English expression here - dickwits involved, and collectively greased them off or loudly commented (I saw several people complaining after I did). So, I'm not disengaging anymore. It doesn't work.

I've got no idea what the Jack Black film was like. It was the first film I'd attended since the Melbourne International Film Festival, which was largely "Asian" and some of the films from which have now gone back home to China.

FanTAStic day for Australia.

* Very interesting to me that a plan aimed at teaching English properly should be entitled the "fair dinkum" test. Doesn't it just roll off the tongue? Such excellent expression would make the proudest wordsmith blush.

Today, my wireless internet died, my phone credit ran out, and the key to my house went missing so I couldn't leave for so much as a cup of coffee in the sunshine.

Essentially, I was locked inside the house and unable to contact anyone in any way except possibly morse code, which I couldn't learn because I didn't have the internet.

I got so much work done.

Someone has GOT to fix this untenable situation.

It relaxes me that the Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens' website has a "FUNGUS OF THE MONTH" section.

Check out this month's fungus! It's from East Gippsland, as are Patties Pies and Rita.

It's late, and my head still feels like it's rolling around in a jar.

This is my second (or third) sporting update in as many days. Unusual.

If this one makes no sense, however, it is because I am concussed.

This afternoon, turning my head back over my shoulder to discover that the tram I was about to catch was rapidly approaching the stop, I accelerated (with great force) into a telephone pole, face first.

It was ludicrously painful. For a while, I held my soaking face (tears were pouring down my face, blood was flooding from my nose) and tried to regain my composure. As far as sporting injuries go, sprinting into a pole in front of a park full of picnicking Young People (Edinburgh Gardens) is really not the most heroic way to bruise.

After my embarassment died down, my fear set in. I've looked up "concussion" on the web, and it says that if one pupil is bigger than the other and you have a headache and feel dizzy and your eyes hurt... you're concussed. Anyway so I looked in the mirror and I have one TEENSY pupil and one MASSIVE pupil that has staged a coup over the rest of my eye.

I'm convinced I'm in extreme danger of expiring overnight from a sporting injury caused by my being late. What a fitting way to go.