If you make it here, you've been here too long | January 28, 2007 | 21:07

I had a thought recently about New York, New York ... that city across the East River from the almost as unfriendly borough of Brooklyn that I'd like to call home were it hospitable. The thought I had about New York ... The Greater City of New York, that is ... was that this city is prison without physical boundaries and without obvious guards.

Conceivably, one could walk, run, bike, swim, drive, take a train or use any other method of conveyance to leave this municipality. If someone makes up their mind to move to Des Moines, no one is going to step up and tell them they can't leave New York.

But New York is hard to leave. Not because it's so great that it is not worth living anywhere else, but because the city traps its inhabitants. The daily struggle just to subsist here is so taxing that it can sap even the energy to enjoy oneself. Once the working day is done and dinner has been had, sleep beckons becasue the New Yorker is exhausted by the fight to earn a low-ball salary.

Then, the idea of finding a new job elsewhere, relocating, acclimating to somewhere else is daunting. Not because New York is so beautiful, with its dog shit-laden sidewalks, gum-riddled subway platforms, mountains of garbage bags on the side of the road, rude inhabitants and slave-labor employment prospects ... but because this city institutionalizes its residents much like a prison does an inmate. Once inured in the culture of the big apple, extricating oneself is like escaping a tar pit or quicksand; most people can't.

I know I haven't been able ... and my reason for not leaving is fairly absurd: if I leave, I'll feel like a failure. I'll feel like this dirty, unfriendly metropolis beat me. I would also be loath to leave my job, which I enjoy immensely and feel lucky to have landed. I'd always like to earn more, but I'm up for proving that I'm worth it ... yet in all other aspects, I'm kept here by my desire to "make it".

In a way, I'm like an underdog figher being clobbered by the heavyweight champ, who's beating in my brains, yet I won't just stay down on the canvas because I refuse to concede that I've been beaten to a bloody pulp. It'd behoove me much more to move somewhere bucolic, with a lower cost of living, a slower pace and nicer people ... really, who could argue that lawns and trees, smiling faces and more money in the bank are bad things? But I stay here ... I guess because I don't feel quite beaten, yet.

But I feel that I've been getting beaten. The hits I've taken from nightmarish roommate scenarios and housing drama, job shakeups and career aimlessness, breakups and assorted aftermaths ... I feel like I've got little else to show but scars.

I keep thinking that the big payoff is coming, though ... it's sad, I'm like an addicted gambler or a mediocre thief ... just one good horse or one big score ... that's all I need and then I'll have it made.

Honestly, I'm getting the sense that if you make it in New York City, you've just been here way too long.