Switch Pitcher: Evolution of Darwin

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Book Description:
Switch Pitcher is a book within a book. The narrator of the book Hugo is a first time novelist. He is falling in love with his girl friend Stacy whom he has recently met. Hugo notices a curiosity shop near to where he lives in Manhattan. The shop is never open and Hugo is curious as to why. He gets Stacy to play detective with him and this leads them into philanthropy and world adventures. Meanwhile he is reading his novel to Stacy as he is writing it. The book is about a young baseball player named Darwin.There are a number of associations with the real Charles Darwin as Hugo is a fan of his works. Both Hugo and his character Darwin evolve as the dual stories proceed.

Here is the sample of the first chapter:
My name is Hugo Cjelli. I am the storyteller of this tale. I think it is a good idea to introduce myself right away so you will know from the get go who is doing the narrating. I guess I could be lying so you really have no way of knowing if I am who I say I am till you read more and even then I could be real clever and still be lying. Then again I’m not that clever so you will just have to take my word for it; or I could just have written that to mess with you. Enough with this strange prelude and let’s get back to my story.

I did not like my name when I was a kid but I’ve kind of grown into it or maybe just gotten used to it. With a name like Hugo it is difficult to feel wanted. It’s like everyone is saying to you “you go” all the time. I’m joking of course and I actually had a great mom who loved me unconditionally. I don’t know where I got my sense of humor from as my mom Tara never joked about anything that I could remember. It was my dad who wanted me to have the name Hugo because he was a Hugo also. He actually did go when I was around eleven. I did not get to know him very well so maybe the humor genes came from him. That actually makes me Hugo Jr. but I don’t use the Jr. too often. I don’t think I’m very funny, perhaps a pleasant sense of humor but the kids in class always laughed at stuff I did. Tara never asked Hugo dad to go, he left on his own. Hugo Sr. had a midlife crisis and walked out on mom and me to seek his fortune elsewhere.
My dad, Hugo First or Hugo Sr. was cheating on mom for a number of years. She knew something was up but never really wanted to find out. You could say she had the ostrich condition but I also read where ostrich’s don’t really bury their head in the sand; so her condition was I just don’t want to know. She finally found some emails on their computer that he had forgotten to delete. When my mom confronted him with the evidence he had no choice but to admit the truth. Actually he did try to lie about it at first and say that it was from an old male friend of his that he was helping out, as the man had no family and he was his only friend. My mom knew from the style and content of the notes that the emails were from a woman probably a young woman at that. She kept the pressure on my dad to confess and he finally admitted that he was having an affair with you guess it a younger woman. My mom the saint that she is was still willing to give him another chance but he decided to leave for the other woman. That was the worst decision he could have made. He divorced mom, which was a big mistake and went with the younger woman that he had the affair with. They got married and she quickly spent most of his money and then he put his tail between his legs and came running back to us; but mom who was the most loving and forgiving person did not want him back at that point. She forgave him and let me see him but I was still pissed at him and did not want to relate with him until recently which is almost 15 years later being that I am about 25 now. I have not seen him much but I feel mostly sorry for him as he left a great lady in mom and he is not that healthy either. He drank and smoked quite a bit for a number of years and though he finally quit both addictions, it did take a toll on his health. He has this bad cough and I don’t think his lungs are in any kind of shape. He works as a private investigator; ironically mostly spying on spouses who are cheating on their mates. He lives in a nice area of Brooklyn and is not doing all that badly financially now. He seems to have matured with age and had sent me some money for college and came to my graduation. We also had him over a couple of times for Thanksgiving dinner and I still was pissed at him but less so.
I had no siblings, as I was the only child that was born to Hugo and Tara. I was not spoiled like some only children that I’ve met in my life. Mom worked as the librarian for a private School in Manhattan. She had been a history teacher in the Brooklyn school system before that but got a better salary with the private school. We lived in Brooklyn and I went through the public school system. I was the class clown back in Junior High, probably a reaction to my parents breaking up though I don’t really know if that is a normal psychological response. My mom had to come and get me out of the Principal’s office a couple of times for doing dumb pranks but I was a pretty good student so they let me come back the next day and my pranks did not really hurt anyone. I think the principal who was a nice man actually enjoyed them but protocol still had him detain me.
I did read a lot as my mom loved books and taught me from a very young age the value of reading. I mellowed out in high school, no more class clowning around. I went to Stuyvesant High School, a special academic high school that I had to pass a test for in order to attend. It is in lower Manhattan, which was right near the World Trade Center and not far from where we lived by subway. My mom and I would sometimes even take the subway together in the morning though I got out earlier than she did and was usually home first. I was in my sophomore year when the terrorists blew the World Trade Centers to smithereens.
Everything as you probably remember closed down that day and I had to walk home with some of my friends over the Brooklyn Bridge. My mom did not make it home till after dark and we were so happy to see each other, we cried for both joy and sadness. Being so close to the devastation definitely affected me for some time. I was just another student in high school, no clown credentials. I did well in my studies and got an academic scholarship to attend college as we were not very wealthy in respect to money but mom was extremely wealthy with her kindness.
Mom remarried a few years back, once I left the nest for college. He is a sweet and affluent guy and I am happy for them both. His name is Jack and I see them on occasion as they live in Scarsdale, which is not too far by car, or train from Central Park West in the city, where I live now. He was divorced from his first wife and he had a couple of daughters. One was about my age and the other one was a year younger than me. They were both extremely attractive. I had a crush on both of them and they were part of my fantasies till this day. They were in college like I was when Jack and my mom first got together. I did not see them too often in the beginning as they lived most of the time with their mom or were at school. I did get to be around them on some holidays and in the summer. The older one Rachel studied biology and is still going to graduate school now. The younger daughter, Velocity, studied drama and now lives not too far from where I do. We actually dated some a couple years back but Velocity had her eye out for a semi-famous actor she had done a play with. It was kind of strange anyhow almost like dating a real sister. I never had a sister and would not have minded that so much as she was really not my type in the way we looked at life or intellectually for that matter though her beauty made up for a lot. We did date for a few months and we did have sex but it was not as good as I would have expected, certainly not as good as my fantasy of her. Sometimes it is best to just keep the fantasy and not act on it. It did not ruin my fantasy all together so all was not lost. I think she just dated me and had sex with me to demonstrate her power to herself as well as to me.
I get up usually at the same time every morning around 7AM. Sometimes I wake up quite a bit earlier and then doze off again and have these magnificent wild dreams. I usually forget them after a few minutes but I knew for a while that they were magnificent and of course wild. Occasionally I will remember one for longer than a few minutes. I want to write a great novel but trying to figure out what the plot will be is difficult. Every plot I think of seems to already have been written by someone. I have read an awful lot of books. There are so many different plots but the basic one is boy meets girl or girl meets boy or now boy meets boy or girl meets girl. There are all kinds of types of books like mysteries and adventures and scary stories but the basic theme seems to be someone meets someone. Maybe I shouldn’t have read so many books, then I could think of any plot and it would seem original. Maybe I don’t require a plot or maybe if I just start writing and the plot will just turn up like those magnificent dreams. Maybe if I would write down my dreams I would have a plot.
Someone said but I’m not sure who, that if you had an infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite amount of time on a typewriter or I guess they would be using a word processor these days on a computer or maybe if they were older monkeys they would be using a quill pen; they would produce all the literature ever written. Those conjectures seem a wee bit silly but pass me a banana please.
I wonder if they meant the selected writers should be apes and not just monkeys. Apes are supposedly more intelligent than monkeys, bigger brains and all that. Actually the real difference between apes and monkeys is that monkeys have tails and apes have no tails. So I suppose if monkeys used their arms and tails to type they could write a best seller faster than an ape. Apes like to copy what other apes do and say. That is why we call them apes. I guess most if not all literature is just in some way an ape typing or writing you know just copying what some previous ape wrote or said but putting the story into their own words. I am an ape so that is what I will do. I wonder why they call it tweets on the social network Twitter instead of saying what it really is, which is aping or copying. It just seems that everyone is just aping everyone else. Birds tweet and humans ape. Humans are included in the Great Apes. So what makes an ape great you might ask? Actually there is only one lesser ape, aka a Gibbon, and the difference is that it is smaller in size than the great apes which even include the Pygmy Chimp or Bonobo; so even the Pygmy can be considered “Great”. Actually the Bonobo is a remarkable primate or ape being that the female pretty much rules the group through sexual persuasion. Maybe these Pygmies are the greatest apes, though human females are pretty persuasive in their own right.
Primates belong to the mammalian taxonomic order that we humans belong to and by definition primate means first rank of course. The primates include both simians and prosimians. The simians include the aforementioned monkeys and the apes, both the great and lesser kinds. Prosimians are considered to be more primitive than simians but I think we could use all the help we can get typing those great works of literature so we will use them too if I was in charge of the typing pool. My favorite prosimians are the lemur, which is not only indigenous to Madagascar, the African island where they evolved independently from other primates. Many species of lemurs developed on Madagascar ranging from real small ones only about an ounce in weight to big ones that were almost the size of a gorilla but those larger ones went extinct once humans arrived on the island. The whole population of lemurs is endangered now. They are similar to the Bonobo as they have a female social dominance. Maybe that is why I like them so much or maybe I just like them because they are so cute. Enough of this monkey business for now.
One idea I have for a book is a story about a writer who is writing a story about a writer? That is a lot of words but not much action. They are all too busy writing to do anything and who wants to read about people writing anyway? Maybe other writers might like reading that as most of us, I mean they are quite narcissistic but they are probably too busy writing to read other peoples stuff anyway. We will see.
There are many different writing styles and idiosyncrasies. I just saw a show on television about the writer Eugene O’Neil. According to this show, he would only write with a pencil on a pad of paper. They did not have computers of course but he even disdained the use of a typewriter or even pens. He would only use a special kind of pencil and a specific kind of paper. I also recently watched a documentary about Woody Allen who I think has made so many great movies and is one of the funniest men ever to live. He said that he has written all of his screenplays on this old typewriter he got when he first started out. He cuts and pastes by actually using a scissor and a stapler. I don’t want to think about or even imagine how the first writers had to make their own paper and writing instruments. I guess I just imagined it in spite of myself. Now that was some real and true dedication to their art.
I like to write on the computer using a word processer, as then you don’t have to give it to someone to type it up for you. It checks your spelling but some words still make it through misspelled. It is so easy to move paragraphs and lines around. I could not imagine doing that with a pencil and a pad unless I was like Mozart and every note is in perfect place on the first try. I could see that it might have been fun for awhile to use a quilled pen dipping it into ink and learning elegant calligraphy but I don’t think that is done much any more at least I know of no one save some old Japanese artists. Imagine all those primates using quilled pens. Who would have the time to read all that?
It is so easy to delete a word or a section on a computer too, sometimes too easy, as you can lose stuff if you don’t save it right away to your file; just by tapping some unknown key that you did not even know you tapped. That has happened to me on more than one occasion; probably my best stuff. I definitely did not find it funny at the time. I am pretty sure maybe O’Neil and definitely Woody Allen would probably have been laughing at me if they were watching me cry from doing that. Hey! That is an idea for creating a story. I can just write down lots of words with no significance behind them and then start deleting words to create some meaning. Then a story would appear magically like a sculptor sculpting a figure out of marble. Maybe that is how Shakespeare came up with so many plays, from one hunk of marble script; or maybe he had a lot of monkeys working for him. As you will soon find out I have fallen in love recently with a wonderful girl. The center of my story I believe is going to be about this love and how it evolved.

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