And It Was Here In This Blighted Place

My life fades...
the vision dims...
all that remains
are memories.
I remember
a time of chaos,
ruined dreams,
this wasted land.
And most of all,
I remember
the Road Warrior.
The man
we called Max.
To understand
who he was,
we have to
go back to
another time,
when the world
was powered by
the black fuel
and the deserts
spread great cities
of pipe and steel.
Gone now, swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel they were nothing. They had built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked...and talked...and talked. But nothing could stand the avalanche. Their world crumbled, the cities exploded. Whirlwinds of looting, a firestorm of fear...Men began to feed on men...Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. And in this maelstrom of decay, all normal men were battered and smacked. Men like Max...a burnt out, desolate man, a man haunted by the devils of his past. A man that wandered out into the Wasteland. And it was here, in this blighted place, that he learned to live again.
--The Feral Kid's soliloquy from "The Road Warrior"