I walked from my living room to my kitchen, cleaned a glass and drank water. A worm outside was shriveling, a cockroach crawled across the outside of the kitchen window. I stepped outside to check the mail, my bare feet burned on the pavement. Such an inhospitable place for my evolved form, as if the Earth became a new planet, became a new Venus and the only life forms capable of surviving this new suffocating environment were those that could survive the imminent nuclear war, as if this were the aftermath, except with air conditioning and cold water inside our bomb-shelter-spacecrafts. As if, even in our near constant state of consciousness and awareness, Society managed to destroy and vaporize itself and we did nothing about it. Like the bombs became the white noise of a fan in the background until we phased them out and forgot and assumed our shelters were the same as our homes of the past. No, the imminent nuclear war was not imminent, not an as if, it had already happened. There was no air conditioning or cool water, just the illusions the mind can create. In the heat my brain melted into a hot sludge, paved the road, the other humanoids looked from the shelters, only saw a cool guy checking his cool mail.