I recently joined the website KindleMojo and setup an author profile. It offers free profiles and is another way to connect myself with potential audiences. Recently the site started their first contest in which you can win some advertising space. I thought it would be a good chance to dust off the ol' creative cobwebs and have a little fun in the process.

Here was the Challenge (Stories must be at least 700 words):

Write this Fellow's back story:

 Below is the story I submitted....

Comforting Non-Conformity            Reginald Shaun Tuttleworth, or Regger, as he liked to be called had always considered himself a loner and a rebel. Not because of his fierce independent spirit and constant shirking of societal norms; but because he was a huge fan of 1980’s pop-culture. Living apart from society and constantly fighting against its perceived “norms” offered a stark, bi-polar contrast to his obsession with 1980’s pop-culture and the commercialization associated with it.Regger’s mother was a stage hand for a number of local punk rock bands that traveled the Pacific-Northwest. She was on the road almost 7 days a week. Setting up and tearing down gigs, sometimes multiple bands on one night, was physically challenging and time constrained work. Most of the punk bands she supported were notoriously late for the venues. As such, the equipment that needed to be setup was never available early to allow for a proper, professional setup. Wires and cables were rarely tied off or wrapped neatly. Instead the jumbled spaghetti stranded masses of black instrument, speaker, and power cables were hastily plugged in and duct taped down the best they could to, hopefully, keep them from getting pulled out during the high energy, and often violent sets the bands performed. The hours were long, but the pay kept food on the table, the bills paid, and the opportunity to work with and watch perform some of the best punk bands in the world.Regger’s father was a mid-level avionics engineer working for the Boeing Company in their commercial aircraft division. Growing up it was obvious he was destined to become and engineer of some sort. He was always taking things apart, putting them back together, and tinkering with things trying to make them work better or more efficiently. When he got to high school he enrolled in computer aided drafting and electronics classes. After graduating high school he was accepted into the University of Washington’s engineering program where he double majored in electrical and aerospace engineering. Graduating with a 3.9GPA Boeing hired him immediately. Starting out as a junior engineer working on commercial aircraft, designing and testing parts and assemblies, was the challenging and exciting engineering career he had always wanted. Slowly though, as he worked his way up, the bureaucracy of working for one of the world’s largest companies started to get to him. No longer was he building, creating or modifying. Instead he was writing performance requirements, verifying vendor specifications, and attending product team meetings. The hours were long, but the pay kept food on the table, the bills paid, and the opportunity to work with and watch some of the best aircraft in the world.The Rancid Rockabilly Café was the very definition of punk personified into a small dive bar. Just north of Everett, Washington it was a 1,800 square foot pre-fabricated drab metal building a couple miles east of Interstate 5. Inside the walls were adorned with a variety of instruments, more broken then intact, along with vinyl records that cover almost the entire history of punk rock music arranged haphazardly on all four walls and in absolutely no discernible order whatsoever.  The only seating in the entire building were 10 stools, bolted down to the concrete slab floor in front of the bar. The non-stop mosh pits and late-night bar fights precluded the need to have much furniture as it would only get broken or used as a weapon during whatever drunken group melee unfolded.It was a mild July evening at the Café. Reggers mom was pacing out back, chain smoking and muttering obscenities under her breath. The equipment hadn’t arrived yet, neither had the band for that matter, and the show was supposed to start in 25 minutes. She was so engrossed in planning her setup routing in her mind that she didn’t hear someone approach her. “Got a light?” the young man asked nervously. “I don’t really smoke and I forgot matches. Then again I don’t normally go to places like this on a Thursday either.”“Where do you normally go on a Thursday then?” she asked as she pulled a worn matchbook out of her jean pocket.“Nowhere, I’m usually at work or at home reading” he replied with a sigh. “What about you?” he asked her.“About the same thing I’m doing now, just not necessarily at this dive.” She said back sighing too.“If you’re really bored we could go make out somewhere.” He replied. Although he tried to pass it off as a joke his voice cracked as he finished up his sentence.She looked back at him incredulously, seeing the shyness and fear in his eyes, she smirked and shot back “Who ARE you?”“I’m not really anybody, just an engineer that doesn’t do engineering for a company that builds things.” He half-heartedly responded.She looked him over intently. He wasn’t a bad looking guy, maybe a little too introverted and unsure of himself for her liking. But she thought back to her current dry spell with men. She had a pretty strict no dating musicians rule because of the complexities of travel and the close knit circle the punk community was in the area. Unfortunately all her time revolved around musicians who put her ability to have a relationship, physical or otherwise, in a serious dilemma. The guy was DEFINITELY not in the same circles she ran in. “Screw it.” She said, flipping her cigarette but on the ground and grabbing him by the arm. “My station wagon’s over here.”After their brief parking lot tryst that was the last she ever saw of him. But not the last she would ever think of him. Nine months later she gave birth to Regger. Being on the road almost non-stop made it impossible to properly care for a child though. Fortunately her mother lived in a small semi-secluded cabin on Whidbey Island, west of Everett, Washington, so she left Regger with her to be raised. Unbeknownst to Regger’s mom, Regger’s grandmother was suffering from mild senility and dementia. Regger’s real parent was the TV. Before and after school Regger spent hours and hours glued to the programs of the 1980’s while his grandmother would doze off in her recliner. Seeing his mother sporadically led Regger to confusedly idolize her and he developed an obsession with punk rock through his brief interactions with her over the years.
By the time he turned eighteen his love of his TV upbringing combined with his obsession with punk rock had led him to get a myriad of tattoos all over his body. The culmination of which ended up being a black outline tattoo of hello kitty, complete with a filled in pink bow on his forehead. Every time he looked back at himself in the mirror it screamed societal non-conformity while simultaneously comforting him with its reminder to the simpler television pacified childhood he had with his grandmother in the absence of his real mother or father.