This is how you think about Lyndon B. Johnson in order to go to sleep at night.
First you listen to Paula Cole sing “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone.” This will help you romanticize Texas, the land that gave us LBJ in the early 1900s. You will hear the howl in her voice and it will transport you back to a time when you were a teenager and flush with springtime hormones year round. This will put you in the right mood to think about your president.
You will imagine an end of the world scene, but sanitized. You and Lyndon Johnson are the last people on earth. This will free you from thinking about the fact that he was a married man. Such a fact would ruin your somnolent fantasy. You will also make sure that you forget ever having watched Spike Lee’s documentary on Hurricane Katrina. Such an experience would remind you of the horrors that accompany a fallen infrastructure.
You are there in an airport, tired, thinking that you are alone, when you sense movement. You turn to see a large swath of man lying on the floor. He, too, looks tired, but in the electric eye contact the two of you make, you know that you have to touch him. You know that you need to feel the heat of his body. He knows it too and he, summoning what little strength he retained past the earthly trauma that ruined the rest of the world, beckons you with one hand. You, digging into the final reserve of your own strength, crawl over to him.
He holds his arm out, and your every instinct tells you to bury your head in that big Texan chest of his.
You relax into him.
You fall asleep.