Back where
I began
to witness the city
as a hotel I
wouldn’t go to—
the reality thirty years did
to me with no permission
to elevate the part I could tell
without mercy.
from pages 158-159 of Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976 by Hunter S. Thompson (Simon & Schuster, 2000).