Member-only story
I created an Instagram for my fire truck pictures
Because social media is best when it isn’t transacting
From the tenderest of ages, I have been obsessed with fire trucks. Everyone who knows me, after a while, knows this. As a kid, I visited hundreds of fire stations to photographed the trucks. I even heard sirens from inside my house and would run outside to see these flashing machines roar by.
The morning our neighbor’s porch caught fire, from a candle left unattended overnight, I was giddily snapping photos in the street.
I think it’s the combination of chaos, flashing lights, and these big, shiny rigs rushing to the scene that gets me.
For a time I considered a career in the fire and emergency-medical service, as a firefighter-paramedic and ultimately, ideally, as a leader, policy-maker, etc.
The provision of fire and EMS services is not without nuance, and as a child of an urban planner, and an intellectual myself, I have always found the planning and policy of municipal services like fire protection especially fascinating.
But at some point, I decided that such a career wouldn’t mesh well with my other interests and the fact that I’m gay — though now I realize the shortsightedness of that assumption. Nevertheless, militaristic-style…
