On $8 a day, Pitt professor found himself

Sam MacDonald has seen the extremes of free will. A Pitt non-fiction writing professor and… Sam MacDonald has seen the extremes of free will. A Pitt non-fiction writing professor and two-time author, MacDonald recently published his memoir, ‘Urban Hermit.’ The book chronicles the year 2000, a year of ‘fat and happy times,’ said MacDonald. It was the age of Wall Street success, the dot com boom and a country’s piqued interest in reality television ‘mdash; the pre-Sept. 11 era. But for MacDonald, the year 2000 was an experiment in self-discovery ‘mdash; a page-turning, wild bid for financial solvency that, amid America’s flippant, prosperous melee, found him in voluntary seclusion from the national experience. ‘It was a time of plenty,’ said MacDonald in an interview with The Pitt News, ‘and I, in a sense, engaged in that but also completely disengaged from it.’ Five years after graduating from Yale University, MacDonald was far removed from the stratosphere of his over-achieving classmates in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. Instead of a meteoric rise in computer technology or staking out territory as a real estate mogul, MacDonald lived in a Baltimore townhouse and spent most of his free time at a local watering hole, Kisling’s, the staging point for him and his friends. ‘I’m not the guy who can be the designated driver,’ said MacDonald, ‘and I know that about myself.’ He is, more than anything, an all or nothing kind of guy. ‘I couldn’t trust myself to do things a little bit,’ he said. And in the years after his graduation, that extremity manifested itself in his social life. ‘The dollar drafts that morphed into $3 shots that somehow became a $25 hit of Ecstasy, then a bit of ratty marijuana and some meatloaf on the side,’ he wrote of his fun. The manic indulgence in all or nothing enjoyment, however, led to 120 pounds of extra weight and five-figure debts. ‘I guess you could say that I did my own personal NASDAQ. I sat there, and I blew up, in a sense,’ he said. MacDonald devised a plan. Just a little something he lovingly terms, ‘The Urban Hermit Financial Emergency Rotgut Poverty Plan’: In order to save enough money to pay back his debt, MacDonald planned a weekly expenditure of $8, just enough money to buy minimal, bang-for-his-buck groceries. To cut his expenses, MacDonald consumed only 800 calories a day, his nutrition derived solely from lentils, eggs, low-grade tuna (‘none of that fancy stuff’), sliced, low calorie cheese and bread. His new life style left his bar buddies confused and MacDonald wandering in a wasteland of hungry boredom. ‘The experience was extremely claustrophobic. There was nowhere to turn, nothing to do. It was so much me all the time,’ he said. ‘I’m not an inherently asocial person, which is why I think the idea [of the plan] resonated so much for people,’ said MacDonald. ‘One way people avoid really examining themselves is interacting with the world. You can find a way to calm down and take the edge off, but when you cut yourself off, even if you’re a fairly normal person, most people would find some things out that they might not be comfortable with.’ MacDonald’s zealous excesses, first in indulgences and then in his strict adherence to his plan, sometimes come across as a serious problem. The language is to the point: terse and honest, with the traditional ring of an addiction account ‘mdash; one can imagine doctors sitting him down to discuss ‘options,’ and his parents losing weight from worrying, pledging him non-judgmental love and assistance. In fact, some of MacDonald’s critics argue that ‘Urban Hermit’ fails to explore the psychological component of his experience. But to explain his difficulties as an addiction or a disease looks a lot like blame to MacDonald. He has one rule about blame: He places it squarely on his own shoulders. ‘ ‘The most common response I’ve gotten about the book is that I’m glossing over stuff, how I was an addict and I won’t dive into it. My whole point is that that’s a cop-out. Lots of people in the world are addicted to alcohol, heroin or food, and they don’t have the emotional or psychological capacity to disengage from those things. But I valued it more than just a need. I liked my life a whole lot until I couldn’t anymore. There’s a sense that I should be blaming this on somebody. Or there’s the sense that I was raised wrong ‘mdash; no. I had fun. I had a fun, interesting life, and then I paid the price.’ ‘Urban Hermit’ is a wry, insightful exploration of the human being in isolation, and MacDonald does a masterful job of linking his personal narrative with the national narrative. Set against the scurrying excesses of the year 2000, MacDonald’s careful, strict existence resonates with the puritanical center hidden within the candy-coated exterior of American popular culture.’ In the current economic atmosphere, ‘Urban Hermit’ is particularly appealing ‘mdash; it sounds a call to sanity after a period of glut. But most refreshing about MacDonald’s book is its refusal to provide the cut and dry, self-flagellating morality tale we desire. Despite his raucous living, MacDonald turns out all right in the end. We want his frugality to be the ultimate lynch pin to his success, for then it offers us some hope that we, too, can go riding off into the sunset, always carefully guarding the door against a desire for beer, having built a debt-free, physically fit paradise. But it isn’t so. ‘I think what people expected was for the book to be neat and tidy. At the beginning I would live this debauched existence and then finish with puritanical verve. Instead I live a weird mix of those two things. It’s unclear what the message is, even for me. Is it supposed to be an inspirational one: ‘You too can lose 120 pounds’? Or is it: ‘Stop acting like a jackass and straighten up your life’? I think it was the latter. But I wasn’t directing that to other people, it was directed at me,’ said MacDonald. Besides the value of a well-told, captivating story, what recommends MacDonald’s book is its unflinching reality ‘mdash; a book about a real person who loves his life and refuses to apologize. ‘I’m a live-and-let-live sort of guy. I made mistakes, but then I fixed them. There’s no combination of lentils and beers you can eat that will give you a perfect life. It’s a constant struggle to figure out what it is you’re going to do, what you’re going to value.’