In this blog post, I highlighted the awesome Awkward Family Photos website. The reason that site works so well is because it is so universal – we all have awkward moments captured on film. I’ll discuss one of the awkward photos from my past in this post.
Here is the back story on the photo to the left.
The Place: The backseat of Dad’s Invicta, parked outside Aunt Jean and Uncle Jimmy’s cottage in Ardenheim, PA on the Juniata River.
The Time: In the last few hours on the last day of one of the week-long vacations we took at the cottage in the early 70s.
The Anguish: I had made a simple request to Mom to take one last swim in the Juniata before the return trip to Altoona and had been shot down (with extreme prejudice). So I pitched a fit, shut the mother down, and sulked off to the backseat of the Invicta to suffer in silence and solitude.
Fascinating picture there. I am first struck by the red tint of my hair. Not sure if that is an artifact of the photo or what, but that is different. Of course, the interior of the Invicta merits several remarks.
There isn’t a seat belt to be found. Maybe they were buried under the gap between the vertical and horizontal cushions of the backseat? The Invicta was produced by Buick between 1959 and 1963 so perhaps the model that Dad owned simply didn’t have seat belts?
A natural follow-on observation from the seatbelt one is that there is a helluva lot of metal on that door – and at sharp angles that one could imagine could do some damage to the backseat occupant in the event of an accident (assuming said un-seat-belted occupant didn’t fly face-first through the windshield).
Alright, let’s cut out the bullshit! By this point, I know what everybody reading this post is thinking about after looking at that picture. I am going to take this issue head-on. No sense beating around the bush about it. I do want to come clean and own this issue.
I am not at all proud or pleased about the position of my left hand in that photograph or the overall position of my body. I take full responsibility for my actions (whatever they happened to be that day).
I fully understand these are sensitive issues. As with all of the premium content I develop for my weblog, I strive to keep the material at or below a PG-13 level (or do I mean above? I always get those confused) . Having said that, a man’s reputation is at stake here. I will mount a vigorous self-defense. My apologies in advance for the risqué nature of this post, but that is the kind of photo that could torpedo a future run at a political office by Your Faithful Servant. All the political operatives advise that you need to get out in front of issues like this with the truth. If you don’t believe me, ask this assclown.
The picture above is a 1200 DPI scan of an original photograph taken 40 years ago using (probably) a cheap Kodak camera. So there are certainly some technical limitations in terms of the quality of the original source material. However, I still find it quite instructive to zoom in on the awkward (for me anyways) portion of the photograph – see the image to the right.
I don’t know what the call on the field was that day. Frankly, I don’t care - because it should be bloody obvious to all impartial observers that, upon further review, there is indisputable visual evidence that my left hand is clearly in an open (not clenched) position. So now that is cleared up.
Unfortunately, also upon further review, a close inspection of the zoomed image leads to another uncomfortable question: What in the world is that crap on the back of my shorts? (Here crap is used in a figurative fashion, not a literal one – as least I hope not.) Not sure that I want to know the answer to that question. Since the shorts are long since gone, there is no hope of leveraging the wonders of DNA to get the answer to that question. (I think that is a “Good Thing”.)
