Why Is the Gift Shop Always Closed?

I have no pictures.  I have no story but the wailing tale of woe.  I'm tired of that story myself, but it is the only one I have.  Things seem to get worse instead of better.  I'm referring to my own tale, but at the hospital, I watched the network news, and it seems the universal narrative is going south as well.  The happy place is getting hard to find.  Only the rich seem oblivious.  One tells me he bought a bunch of stock in a company making AI weapons.  Penny stocks that, if they hit, can make you fortunes.  Another has taken his family to Iceland and Greenland on vacation.  Another derides my liberal views from his mansion on the hill.  My mountain friend worries, kinda, but he lives in the mountains and seems on permanent vacation.  I read a--a what?  A paid something or other on how to retire on a million dollars.  That's what it takes to live "comfortably" in retirement--if you are careful.  

Lesson learned.  Next time, I'll make more money.  

Money won't make you happy, they say, and happy won't make you money.  Was that Groucho Marx?  Two for one, one for all, and all form me.  

Many of my conservative friends sound like Trump when they talk about science.  Trump yesterday crowed about his great military parade.  

"They said there was a 100% chance of rain--imagine that, 100%--and it didn't rain.  It didn't rain all day.  They can't predict the weather hours in advance, right?  But they think they can predict it a year or fifty or a hundred years in advance?"

I shouldn't put quotation marks around that.  It is not an accurate quote, I'm sure.  It is just what I remember.   But that is a similar logic to what I hear from my conservative friends.  Illogical nonsense.  

And still they are not ashamed that they have voted for the malevolent idiot three times.  

Meanwhile, "the left" (if that is what we can call it any longer) trade in memes and slogans.  I watched footage of the pathetic chanting in the streets.  I get it, but it didn't look like power.  It looked more like a plea.  

Both sides seem stereotypical to me, but maybe that is all there is.  We are all stereotypes to a degree.  

That is what I got from sitting in a hospital room most of the day, that and a bad back.  I am angry about a lot of stuff, but I don't want to go on about it here just yet.  I'd like to tell you something salty or sweet, but all I have is bitter right now.  

No pictures, no story, and no music.  All I have is the incessant beeping of hospital machinery, the distant crying of a person in misery somewhere down a hallway, and dull hours of waiting.  

Oh, here's a thing.  The hospital is owned by the Seventh Day Adventist, and/so the gift shop sells no magazines or books other than biblical things.  But it doesn't matter, really, for they are rarely open.  Why is the gift shop always closed?