Headshot 2013 by David Robinette / All other photos by Travis Michael Holder

by H.A. Eaglehart

May 13, 2019

I’m slowly moving into the seventh year of a relationship with the love of my life. Does seven years make you a viable expert in something? Expert means being talented in a hard situation. Seven years of love isn’t hard work, so I don’t rightly consider myself an expert on love. All love requires is two souls with time for each other. Have you ever dated anybody my age these days? The young dating pool of 2019 is filled with mini versions of my father. Of those born between 1981 and 1996 more than half think they’ll become millionaires. Specifically, 70% of millennial men and 38% of women believe they’ll become millionaires.

Thankfully my successful father spared me from this delusional millennial state of consciousness, because almost none of my father’s friends who got into the oilfield industry with him after high school succeeded at the same scale as him. Counting my dad, maybe three became owners of their own companies capable of turning a profit and surviving the Great Recession. The vast majority of my dad’s friends wound up dead or in prison, because that’s just what happens to the losers in New Mexico. 2019 is a dating pool of losers convinced by the American Dream that they’re winners.

The only type of person harder to date than a loser convinced they’re a winner, is dating an actual winner. Mom revealed to me by my ninth birthday that nobody can compete with the American Dream. My father is in love with America; hence he has no time for anything or anyone else. You cannot love someone who is in love with America for this country requires a person’s lifetime, which means they have no time left to love their families.

I cannot compete for the love of those who as my father are already in love with the sweet promises of dear Lady Liberty, because love simply requires two souls with time for each other. I have no problem with a relationship involving more than two people, but there isn’t time now for a two-person relationship. How could a tribe possibly exist in a world with modern expectations such as they are? Finding one soul with time for me has more than sufficed my dire need to receive and share love.

I’m not saying I’m rich, but I definitely didn’t grow up poor. For this reason, I cannot deny the need for wealth in this world. But at what cost? The deck is already stacked against me regardless of how successful my father is, therefore, millennials make me laugh. My success in gaining a debt-free college education, runway modeling, acting study in Manhattan and LA, working as a Hollywood horse trainer, and progress in Outdoor Leadership Education are all success resulting from being able to afford doing them.

Over 90% of Americans cannot afford success, and that is the statistic that makes me laugh at my peers. Nothing greater exists than being the cowboy cleaning horse manure with a shovel in Hollywood, and experience millennials (convinced they’re about to become millionaires) looking down upon me as a common laborer. The reason nothing greater exists than being that cowboy is because I can afford to shovel horse shit. Young people do not realize that one must be wealthy to live the luxury of being a cowboy, because working with horses doesn’t pay anything. I have the money to stick around long enough to see those judgmental millennials realize life in America first requires money, be it runway modeling or shoveling horse manure.

I’ve been around long enough to see millennials realize they’re no different than my dad’s loser friends who never made it into the 1% club. Nothing a shit-shoveling cowboy enjoys more than ordering a millennial to make his coffee at Starbucks in the morning. Money is so divisive, which is why seven years of loving my boyfriend wasn’t a day of hard work.

All a country boy needs is someone with time to love, and today that is a rare quality to find. It is hard to find someone who can see a cowboy shoveling horse manure as a man and not a laborer. The result of being star-struck with America is it turns the entire world into laborers forever divided.

The problem with living in a world of laborers is that sometimes the cowboy shoveling horse manure is more worth the time of day than millennials promising to one day be the next Jeff Bezos. The problem with a divisive world is that it allows age to blind us from seeing someone well worth the time to love. The problem with the present is nobody sees anything except the American Dream anymore, which means millennials are in a relationship with a colossal lie.

I don’t need a lie when all I crave is a man. One able to hold me tight for seven years, not as a bragging right, but because seven years of love beats seven years of clinging to illusional grandeur.

“Story of Runaways”

Being self-aware of the journey

Does not reassure the destination

For destiny's road is tread by mortal sole

All seeking to fulfill their hearts

Voids of lonely desire in need

Like dreams of night concocting images of men into gods

Transfiguring us into taillights beneath the setting sun

Vanishing and reappearing with each new bend in the road

Taillights of the future that are always just out of reach

Set between solid lines of paint on asphalt

Boundaries not meant to be crossed

Forever determining fate's hold over us

Abandoning mankind to his fantasies

Always leaving the heart aged tho still in want

Having never set foot upon the imagined destination of gold

Far ahead down this road laid beneath the black night

Somewhere between these painted lines of civil mediocrity

Concluding that nobody can write their own ending

No more than Coronado could find a city of gold

For destinations no longer exist in this world of ours

Paved over long ago in the quest to catch up with those distant headlights

The transfixed illusion of self awareness

Never able to change course

Despite the passionate desire to one day arrive

Driving us farther and farther down this road in a dream of night

Till at last we all wake up in time

To realize that no one has ever left home

Because as surely as the sun shall rise tomorrow

All dreams like roads eventually return us home

 "Home Of My Heart"

 I hear you breathing softly,

As wind whispers through leaves;

Music to my mortal ears,

Stirring my heart into flight,

Barking as crow's wings upon the breeze.

I kneel to take you in my hand;

I cry as you fill my soul with peace,

The mountain is but a reflection,

Of your most beautiful face.

The intoxicating aroma of your essence,

Like pine needles after rain,

Smell like marshmallows roasting;

My childhood memories return.

Life is the embodiment of your figure.

I am but returning home.

May you forever take me,

And overflow my broken vessel

With the powerful magic of love.

What is change? Fighting for civil rights? Reclaiming one’s Native American culture? Buying a new car? A career?

As one gets older it gradually becomes apparent that change is less of a state of mind and more of a spectrum that encompasses the broad unfolding of one’s life here on planet earth. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the earth is in trouble, that things need to change. The million-dollar question is how do we as individuals affect the world around us in a way that actually matters.

Maybe the problem lies in the fact that it’s a million-dollar question. As a teenager, the idea of change sounds easy, because rebellion is an idea rather than a reality. Smoke, drink, have lots of sex, skip Political Science 101 for a day at the lake with your young beautiful friends. The problem with new idealistic eyes is that they haven’t yet seen the consequences of living in our current reality. Live long enough and eventually we all see unplanned pregnancies, STD’s, alcoholism, a fast-paced economy that’s fast replacing all of us with technology, age deteriorating livelihood. Reality makes life much harder to change.

As a rodeo cowboy in college a majority of the young cowboys I met only rode bucking animals because of some misplaced ideal of rebellion. Most of them were trying to get out of abusive homes, working in the oilfield, or simply trying to win the jackpot to pay child support. Unfortunately, none of us saw the outcome of our stupidity: death, broken necks, blood, tears, pain, medical bills. Ultimately the majority of us wound up right back where we started, only now bearing scars, and scars don’t signal anything except defeat. The world keeps spinning regardless. Thus change becomes more and more elusive as new eyes begin to age. Settling for reality by simply accepting one’s place in a pre-established social hierarchy ruled by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Trump is just easier. Vast overpopulation and drones have made us all expendable, except the select few owning fast food and fracking corporations.

I’ll never forget my college years. College was one of the best parts of my life and not because a paper diploma magically elevated me to a state of being that was far above my less financially fortunate peers. Rather it allowed my new eyes to see the world for what it really was, teaching me the most important lesson of my life. That lesson was that earth is a big terrifying place that gobbles up people on a daily basis without so much as even shedding a tear. My professors taught me that as adults our greatest gift is that we are able to do whatever we want with our lives. Anyone can join an anti-Wall Street protest in Manhattan that blocks bridges and Subway stations that keep college kids like myself from making it to 9 a.m. drama class at the Union Square campus—or just as easily anyone can go to work in the oilfield shoveling out Frack sand tanks to pay for tuition like I did.

Perhaps you are beginning to see how arbitrary life is in an uncaring world that desperately needs change. I soaked up sociology and political science like a sponge, I was a master of debate with a grade point average of 4.0 but in the end, I realized that winning arguments can still lose debates like my buddy that dropped out of college to move to Denver to claim his sexual identity that later ended badly. You can use facts, yell, discuss, whatever, and still be unable to change another person’s mind. The only thing that college did for me that Denver didn’t do for my buddy was that my professors cared enough about my future to always help me get back up on my feet when I fell.

Mortality is the Achilles Heel of change. I think that’s why liberals are losing. Sure we had Obama, but we also had Sitting Bull at one point in history too. Great men whose life efforts were destroyed by single elections, which makes the idea of change a million-dollar question. Change doesn’t pay anything. You won’t make a million dollars fighting for change. So how can anyone afford to answer it? Truly loving someone doesn’t reward you in the same way that having sex to advance your career does; just like saving the environment doesn’t reward you in the same way that destroying it can. Our reality is ruled by social perception and dinging bells on Wall Street.

The only other reality to ever have existed was the Native American world, where nature provided an alternative, but mass extinction and logging have swept that away leaving us with an out-of-control economic empire. How do you fight for a reality was losing before you were even born? How do you champion as cause that has already been so badly defeated that it isn’t even strong enough to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office? How do you fight climate change when you need fossil fuel and iPhones to survive? Both of which are polluting our planet at rates not seen in millions of years.

The million-dollar question sucks, because its answer still eludes us. As I get older that answer becomes less apparent and more obscured as I watch young people at Trump rallies chanting with euphoric new eyes or as I see hate crimes against the LGBT community rise instead of decrease and witness friends give up. Just like a bucking horse the world has once again left me face down on the ground in agonizing pain that makes me want to never get up again.

Then for some unknown reason I get up for the hundred millionth time and fall in love with an amazing man who has given me the greatest most fulfilling years of my life—and I use my Outdoor Leadership Education skills to teach kids with new eyes how to ride horses and see the treasure of nature. Suddenly I see the world anew with the same eyes of my old liberal college professors, and just like them I too have realize that change may simply be reminding others just how incredibly wonderful life is. Perhaps the liberal affects the world by reminding the future why it’s worth saving, because the day that our species once again learns to care is the day that we shall see change.

“Monkey Love”

Tan monkey arms

White stringy legs

Nipple-length hair

That's the surface 

Beneath is insanity

Armed with anger

Ready to fight

Too self-aware

Then I met you

Zeus to my Ganymede 

Stag to this doe

Salvation in your strength

Injecting life into me

I was just ugly

Invisible to all around

But Gods see ghosts

Like you saw me

Making me a boy

Someone with emotional feelings

I can be loved

For Zeus loves me

Thus I can love

I love him back

From Olympus we live

Each day exploring love

I'm unworthy of You

For I'm a mortal

You're Zeus of Olympus

Yet, you don't care

You love me regardless

How fortunate I am

To be Zeus's Gany

"Smile"

It’s okay

You can

I won’t tell

Just forget it all

The truth will always be

So why not come away with me

Not forever

Only awhile

Discover someplace new

A place that I would rather visit

Than not know at all

Who's to predict the future

Instead I will smile

Because you’re smiling

My truth

Despite the rest

To discover happiness

Not within myself

Rather finding it in someone else

I cannot alter the world

But we can smile

And regardless of how long or short it lasts

I will know what it is to be home

That place within your smile