I'm in the movies!

One doesn't expect in the normal course of one's life to spontaneously recreate an iconic moment from a famous movie. I don't see myself scrabbling in the dirt for root vegetables in front my tattered mansion crying out "As god as my witness I'll never be hungry again!"

I don't even have a mansion.

And I don't expect to ever excuse myself to go to the bathroom in an Italian restaurant in order to retrieve a hidden gun to come back with to shoot a Police Captain. Even if there are probably a few of them who totally have it coming.

Also I'm fairly indifferent when it comes to cannoli.

I fervently hope I am never stabbed to death in a shower by a lunatic but wish I didn't mention it because now I'll be vaguely worried about it when I do shower tomorrow morning. I am exceedingly unlikely to drown out Nazis by singing the French National Anthem with a bunch of other people at a nightclub, especially given how I don't know any of the words of the French National Anthem, though I guess I could vaguely hum it. And as fun as it might be I guess I won't really be hanging out with a lost, beneficent space alien, helping them call home.

But the other day at the library our check in machine was having a lot of problems. I left the front desk to help. After multiple reboots and temporary fixes things went completely south. It clearly had something to do with the return path from the front entryway. I opened the locked door behind the Friends of the Library bookstore to get access to where returns come through an automated flap, run up a long ramp, and proceed along a conveyor system hugging the ceiling. At the top of this ramp was a clot of hundreds of materials, massed into an almost biological host, rammed up above and contained only by the ceiling itself. 

I climbed onto the conveyor belt. I ascended halfway and got on my knees, and then, as the space between me and the ceiling shrank, crawled on my belly to get at this fantastical lump. As I slithered along the belts and pathways of this huge industrial machinery in service to its problems it suddenly struck me:

I'm in Modern Times.