Post by SUNNY CRUSOE on Dec 15, 2012 22:52:47 GMT -5
[/IMG]
Robinson "Sunny" Barnabas Crusoe
"A question that sometimes makes me hazy - am I or are the others crazy?"
OOC: Tens, Old, been RPing since 2009 and can’t honestly remember how I found this lovely site.[/center]
Canon: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Face-claim:Casper Van Dien
Social Status: High Class, seeing as how he's a best selling author and lives the pampered lifestyle.
Occupation: Author
Age: 37
Appearance:
Sunny is good looking. With brown hair, blue eyes, and charming good looks, he comes across as handsome. At 6’1 with a lightly muscled build he’s got a strong jaw line and shoulders, but he’s not overly bulky and people are often surprised at how strong he really is. He often appears amused, a sly look on his face that tells everyone there’s more going on in his head than he lets on. However, Sunny often forgets to eat or sleep or do laundry, so he can look overly tired, overly thin, and frazzled at times. Mental illness has not been kind to him and when others look into his eyes, they can tell that there isn’t something quite right in them, but most people are too kind to say anything.
Sunny usually dresses in jeans and t-shirts, keeping it simple after being in the military for as long as he was. However, he is also from Hawai'i, so he adds his own island flare with his collection of Hawaiian shirts and floral prints. He is often scruffy looking, but he can clean up for special occasions. He presents himself in a way that people don’t quite know what to make of. He is ex-military, but he has a relaxed way about him that is certainly not military. In a room full of people, he gets noticed for doing something against the normal social conventions, like eating the petals off the flowers, or using his knife to pick his teeth. He doesn’t blend well unless he is researching a book and does not want to be noticed, and even then, he tends to do something to stand out unintentionally. When he is tense, he puts off a vibe that makes people as anxious as he is, and when he feels he has to defend himself, he will. However, he usually avoids mishap with his disarming smile.
Overall Personality:
Sunny is unique. That is the best way to put it.
He spends a lot of time in his own head. It’s what makes him such a good writer. He actively indulges his imagination by people watching (quite obviously) or acting out the scenes in his head to see what the reactions would really be. It has gotten him in trouble a time or two, but he is very well known for his books and can talk his way out of trouble most of the time. If not, his publisher adores bailing him and his assistant de jour out of holding. He doesn’t care about consequences, but tries to avoid doing anything criminal, as being locked up in a little room – padded or not – for an extended period of time does not appeal to him.
After eight years with very limited contact with people, he developed many quirks and abnormal behaviors in order to survive. For instance, he has no filter on the things that he says because he honestly doesn’t know when he is speaking or thinking. Because of this, he often talks to himself or says things to people that most of the population are too polite to put a voice to. He is unapologetic about it, often changing the subject to some other bizarre musing if people seem upset or troubled by what he said. He learned a very long time ago that apologies were only good if they came before you acted, so he does make an effort to apologise before he does anything too out there.
Sunny is immediately suspicious of new people, never knowing if they are real or not. He created people to talk to when he was alone, so now he makes sure that the people he meets are real before he gets too involved in conversations. However, once he is sure people are real, he generally enjoys a good chat or a game of poker. He likes to laugh and have fun, and if he can find people he generally enjoys being around, all the better. When he meets people he doesn’t like, his observations don’t help the situation, and he often ends up naming an unflattering character after them in his next story.
When he gets agitated, it’s because he's had a bit of a mental slip. They happen from time to time, especially since he is not medicating himself properly. He will usually end up shaking, moving disjointed and without purpose, talking in loops around whatever subject is rattling around his brain, becoming highly uncooperative, and not believing anyone who tries to reason with him is real, except for his publisher, seeing as how the cheques he gets are real enough. After these episodes, he becomes quiet, often needing a few days of his medication at full strength to recover. Because of his military background, Sunny responds to authoritative people in a positive way. He does not find them intimidating; they just seem to earn his compliance easier than not. He claims its Pavlovian. Less assertive people will get the run around from him until they get fed up and leave.
Likes, dislikes:
Sunny likes storms. They spark his imagination and energize him. He loves to wander in the rain and has nearly been struck by lightning more times than he can count and had a few colds.
However, he dislikes snow and being cold. When it snows or he’s caught a chill, he will whine about it – loudly, claiming his island blood wasn’t made for New York. Still, he doesn’t have any want to leave the place, so it’s clearly just whining for the sake of being grumpy.
Sunny likes trying out new and exciting things without fear. He likes to add things to his books, and he believes that this is the only way to make his characters interesting.
However, he dislikes it when people try to force him into things. He likes to pick and choose what he does, and if he’s forced to do something, he’ll make it as difficult as possible on the person who’s doing the pushing.
Sunny loves to write. He adores sharing his stories and writing about anything that comes to mind. He has quite the imagination and has become a bestselling author for his talent n this area.
However, as a diagnosed schizophrenic, Sunny has medications that interfere with the writing process and he hates them with a passion. He knows that he needs them and that makes him resent his pills even more. He highly dislikes being dependent on anything, especially because he can’t trust his own mind.
Goals, fears:
Goals:
Sunny strives to write everything in his head, wanting to share the stories he knows and put a little of himself onto paper just in case he loses his mind.
He has the goal of getting the Schizophrenia label removed from his good name, seeing as how he knows there is something wrong with him, but it’s not schizophrenia. Doctors just want to make it so he can’t write because...well, he doesn’t know, but he will figure it out one of these days.
He really wants to buy a hot dog stand just to see how it works. No, wait, scratch that – he wants to buy a hot dog factory to see how hot dogs are made. Or maybe he just wants a hot dog...
Fears:
Sunny’s afraid that he really does have schizophrenia. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if he starts believing that. He feels like this would be the end of his writing career and probably the end of his freedom.
Sunny has the fear of being confined. He hates not having the ability to do what he wants and to go where he pleases. Being confined, unable to do either would terrify him. What’s worse was that he’s been briefly institutionalized and knows how real the possibility could be if ‘normal’ people see he’s out of hand.
Sunny has the fear that he never got off the island and this life he’s made in New York is just his mind playing tricks. It’s not so much that he fears he’s delusional – he’s been there and done that – but there are people he’s met that he would be upset to find weren’t real.
He’s also not overly fond of escalators. They’re possibly going to eat him every time he steps on one. Maybe. Probably. It's a gamble every time.
Overall History:
Sunny was born on the island of Molokai, Hawai’i. He was the only child of Liza and Marlon Crusoe, two scientists and environmental advocates who worked exclusively with the Molokai Forest Reserve. Because his parents spent so much time working, they had no time to be parents, often finding their son to be underfoot. From the time he was four, he was raised by his maternal grandmother who gave him the name Sunny, believing Robinson was too big a name for such a little boy (the name stuck and few people know his real name). She was very authoritative and grounded him in a life of simple living. She home schooled him, ensuring he was educated primarily in literature and history, hoping that with her guidance, he would be a better person than his self-righteous parents. They left him alone until he was eighteen when they took an interest in pressuring him to going to university. They believed that their son was capable of being someone and hoped he would be a lawyer (one that could advocate their causes) but all Sunny wanted out of life was a boat repair shop on the beach and was stubborn about the issue. His grandmother finally persuaded him to go to university and take what he wanted, to experience more out of life. He attended the university of Hawai'i, playing football, and earning a degree in engineering – the only degree he thought may have been useful to his future boat repair plans.
When he graduated four years later, he took time to care for his ailing grandmother. She was suffering from cancer, and refused to endure chemo therapy at her age. When she died, Sunny felt lost. He needed to just get away from the islands for a while and decided to join the navy. The first few years of his career were rather uneventful. He worked in maintenance and communications, having a knack for fixing what was often deemed un-fixable. When he was twenty-four, he met a beautiful woman named Susannah while he was posted near Cuba. They quickly fell in love and were married. However, bouncing from port to port with her husband was not something that Suzie adapted to, no matter how much she loved him. After a year, she just up and left while Sunny was working on ship, taking all their savings and possessions with her. Sunny knew they had their problems, but he felt wounded by the fact she would leave while he wasn’t there to convince her to stay. Sunny’s attitude left little to be desired after that, and after getting beyond snippy with the wrong Admiral, he was reassigned to a relay base on an uninhabited island in the south pacific. The post was normally given on bi-monthly rotations, but Sunny was assigned for an indefinite time frame. The base was literally uninhabited, except for the odd boat that came to resupply the island. The whole purpose of the outpost was to watch for Japanese war ships – which were nonexistent – and maintain the ancient relay tower that was still being used, despite the use of satellites rendering it redundant. It had a name, but Sunny called it “The Island of Despair” seeing as how it was depressing. The ancient technology was in constant need of maintenance, but it didn’t take up much of Sunny’s day, leaving him with long hours of nothing to do. To pass the time, Sunny began to write, using up the mountains of paper he was supposed to be printing out computer logs onto. He didn’t know what he was going to do with these stories, but he was compelled to keep writing. It only took a few weeks before he was thinking aloud constantly to fill the quiet. After a few months, he made friends with an odd little man who suddenly showed up on the island. Soon after that, another man – the son of the first man – appeared. Before he knew it, he was enjoying the island with a group of people. They came and went as they pleased – Sunny had no idea where they went, since he had explored the three miles of island and never seen another settlement, but he didn’t let it bother him. He didn’t bother putting anything down about them in his reports, figuring they would probably be forced to leave the island, and Sunny liked the company.
Every year Sunny expected to be recalled from his post, but the Admiral kept pulling strings to keep him there, something the navy had no problem with, as Sunny was a fully qualified engineer who kept the relay post going with minimal hassle. However, after eight years of being virtually alone on the island, someone in the administration figured out that Sunny hadn’t had even a yearly physical since he had been assigned, and so they sent a doctor out to evaluate him. Sunny nearly passed with flying colors. He was charming and said all the right things to put the doctor at ease. Everything was going great until he started arguing with someone who wasn’t there over whether he should have made tea instead of a pot of coffee. Before he knew it, he was being shipped back to the states to a military hospital. Apparently his friends on the island were just coping mechanisms his brain had invented, and he was diagnosed with auditory and visual hallucinations that were commonly found in patients with schizophrenia, even though he adamantly argued that wasn’t what he had. By the time he was released from the hospital, the hallucinations had stopped all together but he wasn’t all the way better. He would still be paranoid about whether the people he met were real, and his social skills were severely altered during his time alone. He was prescribed ongoing medication to help with that paranoia, and warned that if he stopped taking his pills he would experience episodes of extreme agitation. It was one of many things on what Sunny considered to be his list of care and feeding instructions. The idea made him feel useless and depressed, which apparently wasn’t uncommon for patients diagnosed with his brand of crazy, but Sunny still took it personally.
After the hospital, Sunny returned to Hawai’i to spend some time with his parents. He tried to escape into writing stories, but found that was impossible on the medication, so he took to unpacking his old stories from the island and began to read them. His mother stumbled over his stacks of stories and suggested he either throw them out or get in touch with a publisher. Thinking that wasn’t a bad idea, Sunny sent one of the stacks off to a publishing house in New York City. Before he knew it, there was a representative from the publishers on his lanai. He had a contract after that, signing on for several of his stories to be published. Knowing this was his shot to be more than a mental illness; Sunny weaned himself off enough of his medication so that his imagination was working again and began to write. After a while, he tired of the “Robin Masters” jokes and decided to move to New York City. The city was like no other place he’d ever been. For the first few weeks, he was severely culture shocked, barely able to leave his apartment without the full dose of his medication. When he settled in enough, he went off his pills. He wrote observations about the city and it helped him to adapt to the environment. He fell into the routine of writing and wandering the city, just trying to get by as any other guy.
Most Influential Event:
Having to care for his grandmother. Watching the strongest woman he knew fading before his eyes scared him, making him realise that he was going to lose the one person in the world who cared for him. He was scared and had to learn to be strong through it. It also caused him to give up his dreams of staying on the islands, instead running to the Navy, which undoubtedly put him on course for his hallucinations.
Sample Writing:
“Hello. For those of you who don’t remember – or can’t, I’m not going to judge – my name is Sunny and I am a sex addict.”
“Mr. Crusoe.” The group director snapped, already looking cross.
Sunny smiled. Oh, this was far too easy. This was only his fourth time in group therapy here in New York City and he could honestly say that it was a drag. For a bunch of crazies getting together to shoot the shit, it should have been much more interesting than it was. Little slips like that made the afternoon more interesting and kept Sunny from doing things to really shake things up. Like lighting his shoes on fire or ordering pizza for the entire floor – you’ve never seen chaos until you’ve seen a bunch of crazies scrambling for the last slice of pepperoni. Talk about your battle for the bulge...
“Alright. I’m not a sex addict, but I’d like to be,” Sunny amended, getting a strangled chuckle from ‘Twitchy’. “Apparently I’m not the only one.”
“Mr. Crusoe, you’ve been warned. Now, please take this therapy session seriously, or you will have to leave and you will not be invited back.”
The smile slipped from Sunny’s face. If he lost group, he’d have to put in more one-on-one time with his personal psychiatrist. The man gave him no space, so there was nowhere to hide. It was irritating, intimidating...He quite preferred group. He could play hide and seek all day. The director of the group was getting frazzled, though. Sunny wondered if there was a support group for group directors. That would have been interesting to sit in on. Maybe he’d write a book about it. It wouldn’t be a best seller, but it would be amusing.
“My name is Robinson Crusoe and I’m apparently a schizophrenic.”
The group chanted back ‘Hi Robinson’ while the director jotted something down.
“I’m not expecting to get anything out of group because I’m not crazy, but it kills time.”
Another note jotted down. Sunny’s curiosity was peaked. He was going to steal that clipboard one day so he could read what she thought about him.
“Can’t report that much is new – just got a new idea for a book about a clipboard wielding madwoman, and I switched to Downy, so my shorts are pillowy soft. Or was that Snuggy...? Some detergent. Anyways, it doesn’t matter. The point is my clothing’s never been softer and it brightens my outlook on life. I might even spread my good cheer and buy a dog or a parrot,” Sunny offered with a shrug, beaming as his next thought hit him. “My assistant’s had a good week! He’s finally getting over the sexual attraction he had to my fern. The ferns a little depressed, but –”
“Mr. Crusoe!”
Yeah, he knew that tone. She was almost about ready to throw that clip board. That’s alright, he was getting bored anyway.
“Yeah, yeah. I know,” Sunny sighed, standing. “See you all next week.”
[/size]
Robinson "Sunny" Barnabas Crusoe
"A question that sometimes makes me hazy - am I or are the others crazy?"
OOC: Tens, Old, been RPing since 2009 and can’t honestly remember how I found this lovely site.[/center]
Canon: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Face-claim:Casper Van Dien
Social Status: High Class, seeing as how he's a best selling author and lives the pampered lifestyle.
Occupation: Author
Age: 37
Appearance:
Sunny is good looking. With brown hair, blue eyes, and charming good looks, he comes across as handsome. At 6’1 with a lightly muscled build he’s got a strong jaw line and shoulders, but he’s not overly bulky and people are often surprised at how strong he really is. He often appears amused, a sly look on his face that tells everyone there’s more going on in his head than he lets on. However, Sunny often forgets to eat or sleep or do laundry, so he can look overly tired, overly thin, and frazzled at times. Mental illness has not been kind to him and when others look into his eyes, they can tell that there isn’t something quite right in them, but most people are too kind to say anything.
Sunny usually dresses in jeans and t-shirts, keeping it simple after being in the military for as long as he was. However, he is also from Hawai'i, so he adds his own island flare with his collection of Hawaiian shirts and floral prints. He is often scruffy looking, but he can clean up for special occasions. He presents himself in a way that people don’t quite know what to make of. He is ex-military, but he has a relaxed way about him that is certainly not military. In a room full of people, he gets noticed for doing something against the normal social conventions, like eating the petals off the flowers, or using his knife to pick his teeth. He doesn’t blend well unless he is researching a book and does not want to be noticed, and even then, he tends to do something to stand out unintentionally. When he is tense, he puts off a vibe that makes people as anxious as he is, and when he feels he has to defend himself, he will. However, he usually avoids mishap with his disarming smile.
Overall Personality:
Sunny is unique. That is the best way to put it.
He spends a lot of time in his own head. It’s what makes him such a good writer. He actively indulges his imagination by people watching (quite obviously) or acting out the scenes in his head to see what the reactions would really be. It has gotten him in trouble a time or two, but he is very well known for his books and can talk his way out of trouble most of the time. If not, his publisher adores bailing him and his assistant de jour out of holding. He doesn’t care about consequences, but tries to avoid doing anything criminal, as being locked up in a little room – padded or not – for an extended period of time does not appeal to him.
After eight years with very limited contact with people, he developed many quirks and abnormal behaviors in order to survive. For instance, he has no filter on the things that he says because he honestly doesn’t know when he is speaking or thinking. Because of this, he often talks to himself or says things to people that most of the population are too polite to put a voice to. He is unapologetic about it, often changing the subject to some other bizarre musing if people seem upset or troubled by what he said. He learned a very long time ago that apologies were only good if they came before you acted, so he does make an effort to apologise before he does anything too out there.
Sunny is immediately suspicious of new people, never knowing if they are real or not. He created people to talk to when he was alone, so now he makes sure that the people he meets are real before he gets too involved in conversations. However, once he is sure people are real, he generally enjoys a good chat or a game of poker. He likes to laugh and have fun, and if he can find people he generally enjoys being around, all the better. When he meets people he doesn’t like, his observations don’t help the situation, and he often ends up naming an unflattering character after them in his next story.
When he gets agitated, it’s because he's had a bit of a mental slip. They happen from time to time, especially since he is not medicating himself properly. He will usually end up shaking, moving disjointed and without purpose, talking in loops around whatever subject is rattling around his brain, becoming highly uncooperative, and not believing anyone who tries to reason with him is real, except for his publisher, seeing as how the cheques he gets are real enough. After these episodes, he becomes quiet, often needing a few days of his medication at full strength to recover. Because of his military background, Sunny responds to authoritative people in a positive way. He does not find them intimidating; they just seem to earn his compliance easier than not. He claims its Pavlovian. Less assertive people will get the run around from him until they get fed up and leave.
Likes, dislikes:
Sunny likes storms. They spark his imagination and energize him. He loves to wander in the rain and has nearly been struck by lightning more times than he can count and had a few colds.
However, he dislikes snow and being cold. When it snows or he’s caught a chill, he will whine about it – loudly, claiming his island blood wasn’t made for New York. Still, he doesn’t have any want to leave the place, so it’s clearly just whining for the sake of being grumpy.
Sunny likes trying out new and exciting things without fear. He likes to add things to his books, and he believes that this is the only way to make his characters interesting.
However, he dislikes it when people try to force him into things. He likes to pick and choose what he does, and if he’s forced to do something, he’ll make it as difficult as possible on the person who’s doing the pushing.
Sunny loves to write. He adores sharing his stories and writing about anything that comes to mind. He has quite the imagination and has become a bestselling author for his talent n this area.
However, as a diagnosed schizophrenic, Sunny has medications that interfere with the writing process and he hates them with a passion. He knows that he needs them and that makes him resent his pills even more. He highly dislikes being dependent on anything, especially because he can’t trust his own mind.
Goals, fears:
Goals:
Sunny strives to write everything in his head, wanting to share the stories he knows and put a little of himself onto paper just in case he loses his mind.
He has the goal of getting the Schizophrenia label removed from his good name, seeing as how he knows there is something wrong with him, but it’s not schizophrenia. Doctors just want to make it so he can’t write because...well, he doesn’t know, but he will figure it out one of these days.
He really wants to buy a hot dog stand just to see how it works. No, wait, scratch that – he wants to buy a hot dog factory to see how hot dogs are made. Or maybe he just wants a hot dog...
Fears:
Sunny’s afraid that he really does have schizophrenia. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if he starts believing that. He feels like this would be the end of his writing career and probably the end of his freedom.
Sunny has the fear of being confined. He hates not having the ability to do what he wants and to go where he pleases. Being confined, unable to do either would terrify him. What’s worse was that he’s been briefly institutionalized and knows how real the possibility could be if ‘normal’ people see he’s out of hand.
Sunny has the fear that he never got off the island and this life he’s made in New York is just his mind playing tricks. It’s not so much that he fears he’s delusional – he’s been there and done that – but there are people he’s met that he would be upset to find weren’t real.
He’s also not overly fond of escalators. They’re possibly going to eat him every time he steps on one. Maybe. Probably. It's a gamble every time.
Overall History:
Sunny was born on the island of Molokai, Hawai’i. He was the only child of Liza and Marlon Crusoe, two scientists and environmental advocates who worked exclusively with the Molokai Forest Reserve. Because his parents spent so much time working, they had no time to be parents, often finding their son to be underfoot. From the time he was four, he was raised by his maternal grandmother who gave him the name Sunny, believing Robinson was too big a name for such a little boy (the name stuck and few people know his real name). She was very authoritative and grounded him in a life of simple living. She home schooled him, ensuring he was educated primarily in literature and history, hoping that with her guidance, he would be a better person than his self-righteous parents. They left him alone until he was eighteen when they took an interest in pressuring him to going to university. They believed that their son was capable of being someone and hoped he would be a lawyer (one that could advocate their causes) but all Sunny wanted out of life was a boat repair shop on the beach and was stubborn about the issue. His grandmother finally persuaded him to go to university and take what he wanted, to experience more out of life. He attended the university of Hawai'i, playing football, and earning a degree in engineering – the only degree he thought may have been useful to his future boat repair plans.
When he graduated four years later, he took time to care for his ailing grandmother. She was suffering from cancer, and refused to endure chemo therapy at her age. When she died, Sunny felt lost. He needed to just get away from the islands for a while and decided to join the navy. The first few years of his career were rather uneventful. He worked in maintenance and communications, having a knack for fixing what was often deemed un-fixable. When he was twenty-four, he met a beautiful woman named Susannah while he was posted near Cuba. They quickly fell in love and were married. However, bouncing from port to port with her husband was not something that Suzie adapted to, no matter how much she loved him. After a year, she just up and left while Sunny was working on ship, taking all their savings and possessions with her. Sunny knew they had their problems, but he felt wounded by the fact she would leave while he wasn’t there to convince her to stay. Sunny’s attitude left little to be desired after that, and after getting beyond snippy with the wrong Admiral, he was reassigned to a relay base on an uninhabited island in the south pacific. The post was normally given on bi-monthly rotations, but Sunny was assigned for an indefinite time frame. The base was literally uninhabited, except for the odd boat that came to resupply the island. The whole purpose of the outpost was to watch for Japanese war ships – which were nonexistent – and maintain the ancient relay tower that was still being used, despite the use of satellites rendering it redundant. It had a name, but Sunny called it “The Island of Despair” seeing as how it was depressing. The ancient technology was in constant need of maintenance, but it didn’t take up much of Sunny’s day, leaving him with long hours of nothing to do. To pass the time, Sunny began to write, using up the mountains of paper he was supposed to be printing out computer logs onto. He didn’t know what he was going to do with these stories, but he was compelled to keep writing. It only took a few weeks before he was thinking aloud constantly to fill the quiet. After a few months, he made friends with an odd little man who suddenly showed up on the island. Soon after that, another man – the son of the first man – appeared. Before he knew it, he was enjoying the island with a group of people. They came and went as they pleased – Sunny had no idea where they went, since he had explored the three miles of island and never seen another settlement, but he didn’t let it bother him. He didn’t bother putting anything down about them in his reports, figuring they would probably be forced to leave the island, and Sunny liked the company.
Every year Sunny expected to be recalled from his post, but the Admiral kept pulling strings to keep him there, something the navy had no problem with, as Sunny was a fully qualified engineer who kept the relay post going with minimal hassle. However, after eight years of being virtually alone on the island, someone in the administration figured out that Sunny hadn’t had even a yearly physical since he had been assigned, and so they sent a doctor out to evaluate him. Sunny nearly passed with flying colors. He was charming and said all the right things to put the doctor at ease. Everything was going great until he started arguing with someone who wasn’t there over whether he should have made tea instead of a pot of coffee. Before he knew it, he was being shipped back to the states to a military hospital. Apparently his friends on the island were just coping mechanisms his brain had invented, and he was diagnosed with auditory and visual hallucinations that were commonly found in patients with schizophrenia, even though he adamantly argued that wasn’t what he had. By the time he was released from the hospital, the hallucinations had stopped all together but he wasn’t all the way better. He would still be paranoid about whether the people he met were real, and his social skills were severely altered during his time alone. He was prescribed ongoing medication to help with that paranoia, and warned that if he stopped taking his pills he would experience episodes of extreme agitation. It was one of many things on what Sunny considered to be his list of care and feeding instructions. The idea made him feel useless and depressed, which apparently wasn’t uncommon for patients diagnosed with his brand of crazy, but Sunny still took it personally.
After the hospital, Sunny returned to Hawai’i to spend some time with his parents. He tried to escape into writing stories, but found that was impossible on the medication, so he took to unpacking his old stories from the island and began to read them. His mother stumbled over his stacks of stories and suggested he either throw them out or get in touch with a publisher. Thinking that wasn’t a bad idea, Sunny sent one of the stacks off to a publishing house in New York City. Before he knew it, there was a representative from the publishers on his lanai. He had a contract after that, signing on for several of his stories to be published. Knowing this was his shot to be more than a mental illness; Sunny weaned himself off enough of his medication so that his imagination was working again and began to write. After a while, he tired of the “Robin Masters” jokes and decided to move to New York City. The city was like no other place he’d ever been. For the first few weeks, he was severely culture shocked, barely able to leave his apartment without the full dose of his medication. When he settled in enough, he went off his pills. He wrote observations about the city and it helped him to adapt to the environment. He fell into the routine of writing and wandering the city, just trying to get by as any other guy.
Most Influential Event:
Having to care for his grandmother. Watching the strongest woman he knew fading before his eyes scared him, making him realise that he was going to lose the one person in the world who cared for him. He was scared and had to learn to be strong through it. It also caused him to give up his dreams of staying on the islands, instead running to the Navy, which undoubtedly put him on course for his hallucinations.
Sample Writing:
“Hello. For those of you who don’t remember – or can’t, I’m not going to judge – my name is Sunny and I am a sex addict.”
“Mr. Crusoe.” The group director snapped, already looking cross.
Sunny smiled. Oh, this was far too easy. This was only his fourth time in group therapy here in New York City and he could honestly say that it was a drag. For a bunch of crazies getting together to shoot the shit, it should have been much more interesting than it was. Little slips like that made the afternoon more interesting and kept Sunny from doing things to really shake things up. Like lighting his shoes on fire or ordering pizza for the entire floor – you’ve never seen chaos until you’ve seen a bunch of crazies scrambling for the last slice of pepperoni. Talk about your battle for the bulge...
“Alright. I’m not a sex addict, but I’d like to be,” Sunny amended, getting a strangled chuckle from ‘Twitchy’. “Apparently I’m not the only one.”
“Mr. Crusoe, you’ve been warned. Now, please take this therapy session seriously, or you will have to leave and you will not be invited back.”
The smile slipped from Sunny’s face. If he lost group, he’d have to put in more one-on-one time with his personal psychiatrist. The man gave him no space, so there was nowhere to hide. It was irritating, intimidating...He quite preferred group. He could play hide and seek all day. The director of the group was getting frazzled, though. Sunny wondered if there was a support group for group directors. That would have been interesting to sit in on. Maybe he’d write a book about it. It wouldn’t be a best seller, but it would be amusing.
“My name is Robinson Crusoe and I’m apparently a schizophrenic.”
The group chanted back ‘Hi Robinson’ while the director jotted something down.
“I’m not expecting to get anything out of group because I’m not crazy, but it kills time.”
Another note jotted down. Sunny’s curiosity was peaked. He was going to steal that clipboard one day so he could read what she thought about him.
“Can’t report that much is new – just got a new idea for a book about a clipboard wielding madwoman, and I switched to Downy, so my shorts are pillowy soft. Or was that Snuggy...? Some detergent. Anyways, it doesn’t matter. The point is my clothing’s never been softer and it brightens my outlook on life. I might even spread my good cheer and buy a dog or a parrot,” Sunny offered with a shrug, beaming as his next thought hit him. “My assistant’s had a good week! He’s finally getting over the sexual attraction he had to my fern. The ferns a little depressed, but –”
“Mr. Crusoe!”
Yeah, he knew that tone. She was almost about ready to throw that clip board. That’s alright, he was getting bored anyway.
“Yeah, yeah. I know,” Sunny sighed, standing. “See you all next week.”
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