West County’s surprise scatological social media phenom

Shawn Boland melds poetry and philosophical musings with foul language and stunningly creative graphics to create content that has garnered him well over a million followers

Shawn Boland’s photo and video effects are fantastically colorful—almost as colorful as his language. (Image by Shawn Boland)

Shawn Boland, 51, of Guerneville, is a colorful character by any stretch of the imagination. By day, he works incognito as a dispatcher for the San Francisco Bar Pilots, a position he has held for over 15 years and one that requires working 12-hour shifts. And in his off-hours he moonlights as a producer of colorful social media content under the moniker Rusty Eyeball, where he has garnered 51,000 YouTube subscribers, 138,000 Instagram followers, 342,000 TikTok followers and 665,000 Facebook followers in a few short years.

Who, exactly, is this bearded, six-foot-one-inch tall, 230-pound, size-15-footed man? Facts are few and woven between outrageously philosophical musings that might just probably be true. Boland / Rusty is, in many ways, larger than life.

Born in Fresno, Boland all but ran away to join the Coast Guard at age 17, where he wound up stationed in Bodega Bay by way of Gloucester, Massachusetts. During his tenure running 44-foot search and rescue boats in Bodega Bay, he fell in love with Sonoma County. After leaving the Coast Guard, he lived in a homemade yurt in Sebastopol for a time, while working as a Renaissance Faire carnie at a beer stand in Black Point, Novato. There he met his wife, Kristen.

The two moved in together and in the ensuing years Boland worked as a cab driver in Santa Rosa, a construction worker and a tugboat dispatcher before securing his present gig as dispatcher for the SF Bar Pilots.

Realizing he needed a creative outlet to offset work stresses, he began making “assemblage art” sculptures out of rusty metal and other scavenged things.

“In all of my sculptures, I put at least one eyeball in it somewhere,” Boland says. “In part because I liked the idea of an art piece that looks back at you, but primarily because in my mind an eyeball was a representation of the ground of our experience: consciousness.”

Out of that, “Rusty Eyeball Creations” was born.

When Boland grew bored with assemblage art he began a project wherein every morning he found a “bad” photo he’d taken and edited it until it looked good and matched that moment as he remembered it. Posting one of those photos each day, on Facebook and Instagram, brought him some measure of catharsis, and he began to accompany each photo with a poem. But ultimately he tired of that endeavor, too.

Which brings us to Boland’s recent past.

A couple of years ago a difficult work issue led to a series of experiences that caused him to reassess his life. They culminated in December 2021 when, while watching a touching movie scene with his wife one evening, Boland was so moved that his “eyeballs got sweaty.” Through the veil of eyeball sweat he had the epiphany that it was a gift to be moved emotionally by someone’s creativity.

“So at the age of 49 I finally, for the first time, discovered what I wanted to do with my life,” he says. “I want to make people feel something, but I had absolutely no idea how to do that.”

He didn’t have to wait very long to find out.

The next day, Dec. 2, 2021, he filmed himself making fermented garlic honey and posted the video to TikTok. It went viral, and so began his life as a social media phenomenon. He has now posted thousands of videos which encompass his poetry, philosophical musings, thoughts on mental health, mushroom-hunting adventures and the things he does to stay out of trouble, combined with fantastically colorful photos and special effects.

“[E]verything I do is really just a distillation of my everyday experience,” he says. “What I’m thinking or have realized. What I’m feeling at any given moment. Even places I go or things I cook I often share in terms of content. My mental health writings or videos are basically existential pep talks to myself in which I say ‘you’ instead of ‘me.’

“I don’t make content about anything outside of my own experience, and the fact that I do it in the moment that I’m experiencing it and sorting something out within myself and that I get my sailor’s mouth involved seems to make it more relatable and digestible to a lot of folks.”

It’s worth mentioning that the colorful language Boland uses is inextricably tied to his appeal.

“The term ‘cuss like a sailor’ is apt,” he says. “I cuss a lot. I say and do irreverent, inappropriate, ridiculous things. The word fuck I use as a gate. If you can’t get through the ‘F’ gate, you might as well move on.” (Editor’s Note: Seriously, his work is not for the faint of heart. You’ve been warned.)

In truth, Boland’s cussing is understated, spoken in the same calm cadence as the poetic narratives he weaves and belied by the warmth and wisdom he exudes.

“Now that I have a following on social media, well over a million folks collectively on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, creating the video content has been incredibly fun and rewarding,” Boland says. “It’s become much more than just providing a counterbalance to my stressful job or a blast of serotonin from the online attention.”

He adds, “I have been surprised to find that it is actually affecting people’s lives for the better. The amount of people who have reached out and straight up told me that my content has saved their lives, that watching my videos or reading my poems literally prevented them from taking their own life, is absolutely astounding. I’m talking about hundreds of folks.”

Which brings us to now.

These days Shawn and Kristen Boland live a block away from the Russian River near Guerneville, with their two kids, Shamus and Maisie. Life is rewarding enough that he stays out of trouble. Shawn publishes social media videos regularly, and stresses how important it is to him not to capitalize on people’s suffering. For this reason, he refuses to incorporate ads into his online media.

“I am @rusty_eyeball on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, and Shawn Boland on Facebook,” he says. “But what I’m most proud of is recently launching a website, www.rustyeyeball.com and offering people the opportunity to have all of my content for the week sent directly to them every Monday via email. I call it the “Weekly WTF” and I’m happy to say that it’s free!”