Take Shitty Pictures

Grateful – pleased by comfort supplied or discomfort alleviated

Some of my favorite pictures are my worst pictures – memories of the shittiest jobs I’ve worked, the shittiest places I’ve been, and experiences I’d just as soon forget. I’m talking rock-bottom, shitty pictures.

Why do I like shitty pictures? Take a look at Instagram. In a world that celebrates the beautiful, we ignore the ugly, gloss over the failures, delete the beta trials, overlook the learning experiences, and forget the building blocks along the way that got us to the beautiful in the first place.

But we are who we are because of the experiences we’ve had. Shitty pictures are the closest reflection of those experiences. They are as close to the reality of our inner selves as pictures will get.

Fortunate – resulting in favorable circumstances

One of the problems of growing up in a wealthy society is a lack of perspective. The problems in first-world countries simply don’t compare to what people in poor, and I mean poor parts of the world experience. If you are reading this, you’re fortunate to not be fending off the reaper by squatting behind a coop, slaughtering wretchedly-thin chickens like this woman:

I didn’t appreciate the shittiness of the next photo until thirteen years later when I had kids of my own. Down the street from the woman above, this was the corner of a cinder block house a family lived in.

This kid lived with several other kids in a roughly 100 square foot cinderblock cube of a home. The family relied on the animals that grazed outside their house for food. There was no electricity in the house and no refrigeration. Temperatures in Iraq reach as high as 120-125 degrees during the day.

When I hear people complain about not having enough this or not having a cool enough that, my thoughts go to the kid above. That photo leaves me with a deep understanding of how fortunate I am.

Lucky – producing or resulting in good by chance

One of my lucky breaks in life was having parents and grandparents who steered me towards real estate. After coming back unscathed from Iraq, I used the money I had saved up from that deployment as a down payment on a condo. I was 21 at the time, in college, working part-time as a Pizza Hut delivery driver, and one of the last people to get a “no-doc” loan before that shady practice culminated in the 2008 real estate collapse.

After I bought the condo, I realized I couldn’t afford to live in it. I leased it to other students and I went to live in cheaper housing. It was always comical to me when gray-haired parents of the young tenants would do a walkthrough during the summer move-in dates. Inevitably they would ask who the owner was and who they should make the rather steep rent check out to, and I had to convince them that it was me.

I don’t know how I leased that place with such a shitty advertisement photo, but I’m glad I kept the photo. I later bought another condo, then traded one of them for two rental houses, and kept growing my rental properties one after another. This one is a good reminder of where I started.

Since I’ve been a landlord, I’ve been lucky that I haven’t had too bad of a catastrophe. Nobody died, the doors, windows, and drywall weren’t destroyed in a drug raid, the tenants didn’t develop a meth cooking habit and burn the place down, COVID didn’t bankrupt my tenants, and the area has experienced constant growth and development. I could have gotten tenant after tenant that failed to pay rent and ultimately drove me to bankruptcy, but I’ve been lucky that this hasn’t been the case.

Blessed – enjoying the bliss of heaven

Hands down, the shittiest picture I have is an x-ray of my kid’s head. When he was 3 months old, a chair tipped over and the elderly woman holding him took a nasty fall. She was uninjured, but his head made a squishy thud on the concrete, resulting a closed fracture and an immediate and alarming amount of swelling. We were a 45 minute drive from a hospital, and he screamed the entire way.

Miraculously, he suffered no long-term damage. If I wasn’t thankful for the blessing of good health prior to this incident, I certainly was afterwards. This photo, not to mention the memory of it, is a constant reminder to appreciate the time I have with my family.

Click away

If you’re like me, you gravitate towards the glamorous photo opportunities to preserve life’s highlights. But if you want your photo albums to reflect the real history of your family for your descendants, take shitty photos.

It’s my hope that my shitty photos serve as a historical legacy to my kids about who they are in the world, where they came from, and how much they are loved.