Hello, I’m Ken Anderson, and I started ChannelKen because I think differently than most people. I’m not claiming I am smart, and I’m certainly not claiming to have all the answers in life, but I do consider myself to be somewhat inspirational. You know people like me: the guy who will stay very quiet and listen to everything happening around him. He keeps his mouth shut until he can’t any longer. When he speaks, people are confused at the beginning. But they start to really listen. He speaks in metaphors, in experience, and somehow he concludes way far off the mark. But then, he realizes he needs to help his audience make the connections (he forgets about his neurodivergence and thinks everyone thinks like him). Normally, you would have given up trying to figure out his point, but when he speaks, you just can’t stop listening. He connects the dots for you and it clicks.
But I’m not that guy. I know I think differently- not a better way, just different. I’m vocal. I will say what’s on my mind because everything I say is my learned or experienced truth. I also overshare, which you’ll learn soon enough. My intent here is to be where you turn when you don’t know what to do. I love doing! I love learning about everything! Building, designing, turning socket wrenches, building electrical circuit boards… just EVERYTHING about life! Our lives are so short: you could spend ten lifetimes doing something new and you still wouldn’t have tried everything.
I used to watch PBS and C-Span regularly. From Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Carmen San Diego, Ghostwriter, Reading Rainbow and tons of others. Then flipping to politics and opinion. There was so much variety in those shows that it piqued my interest in everything. Since variety is the spice of life, I suppose ChannelKen is like a digital journal, maybe even a manual to my brain. PBS didn’t do a lot of politics, and C-Span didn’t run many shows like on PBS, so I decided to combine PBS and C-Span into a hybrid combination: ChannelKen.
I want to earn your attention, so here is my promise: I promise I will always tell the truth, I promise I won’t do everything correctly but when I make mistakes, I will show them. I will highlight mistakes and I will highlight successes. I probably won’t ever do things the right way, or the “correct” way (whatever that means), but I will always show you my way.
My mother and father fought. A lot. When I was 8, they divorced– thankfully.
I had a birth defect and to correct it, I had to have surgery. For the next 18 months, I was in a wheelchair: it was torture but it was also glorious! In the time I was confined to the wheelchair, I realized I was interested in EVERYTHING. I built plastic models of cars, then plastic models of warplanes. Pretty soon I graduated to model rockets, watching how they shot up a thousand feet in the air and how a small adjustment to one of the fin tips could make it spin like it was rifled. It didn’t take long before I started building rubber band powered balsa wood glider planes. I’d build them & fly them until they crashed and broke. That’s usually the time I
I learned structural “engineering” from those glorious Christmas mornings! Those K’Nex boxes were the Holy Grail, the Arc of the Covenant to me. I stayed busy for weeks.
One day I did a police ride along with my local police department. That day changed me: it was the most fun I ever had up to that point. I loved everything about it, and found a way to do more. I started making friends with local police, did more ride alongs, and one day they asked me if I wanted to do an internship-like thing. Of course! That summer, I waited in the lobby every day for 2 weeks until their roll call was over. Once it was over, the officer I rode with came to get me. The shift commander at that precinct asked me if I wanted to join them in roll call each afternoon. I was 15 years old and they gave me the access code to the rear entrance: the entrance employees used. I was one of them for 6 weeks!
In those 6 weeks, I learned how to use their computers in their cars (green letters, no images): how to check tag numbers, how to check people, it would automatically check the FBI’s NCIC system. They taught me to write warnings and citations. I learned how to ignite road flares, how to direct traffic when the officer needed a second. I wasn’t allowed to get out of the car on traffic stops (most dangerous thing a cop can do is pull over a car), anything where someone was reported to be armed, or anything really volatile– remember I was still only 15.
After the six weeks were over, for the next year I just went to high school, got my driver’s license and went back to building my models. I was the fat kid, the kid who everybody thought couldn’t do much of anything. So to prove them wrong, I applied to be a volunteer firefighter. That November I was accepted. I got my hazardous materials operations class, the bloodborne pathogens class, and CPR class completed in time to start my Firefighter-1 class in February.
