I'll admit it now and get it over with: I've never inhaled. When it comes to marijuana, I'm pathetic: I've never put my lips to a joint, I've never sucked the smoke of a bong, I'm not Jamaican. A sack of marijuana might as well be a museum piece to me. I've never seen real, live marijuana. The closest I've come is glancing at the cover of High Times Magazine.

Despite this, I will never be satisfied with my life until I light up a blunt and smoke it down. The reason is simple: I work a crummy nine to five job that is routine and paperwork. It drowns me into an abyss of ordinary, the young white man's burden. I have this feeling that my life could be better if I could smoke a mind-altering drug. I want a release from my steady diet of television and Entertainment Weekly, of daily train rides and chats with co-workers that start and end with "So how was your weekend?" I' m starting to laugh at Dilbert cartoons. I am the ending of "Trainspotting." I'm only 23, too young to be old. From what I remember in high school and college, marijuana promises to deliver me from this evil. For a half-hour-to-an-hour high, it offers an escape from who and what I am without the nasty addiction and hallucinations of other drugs like roach bait or paint thinner. Sure, there's alcohol, but that's not an escape. Being drunk is the same feeling as putting your head on a baseball bat and twirling around 30 times until you fall down dizzy and nauseous. At best, that's a Gallagher routine. Marijuana is youth, respectability and freedom. Roll up, smoke and laugh at the way your butt looks in a mirror.

In reality, I have no idea what pot will do to me. I go by daydreams and imaginations of how I might act when I inhale. I'll probably cough (at least, this is what years of television has taught me). Then I'll exhale through coughing, and finally relax and mellow out, turn on light jazz and write this kind of poetry:

"HACK-HACK-HACK... Ooooohh.... Woah.....
Noah, Noah, Noah
Wyle is god in underpants
Now is the time when we do the chicken dance
JEEsus loves me?
I don't know
BACKSTREET BOYS RULE."

Based on conversations with friends and reading erotic story websites, weed could give me an increased sexual appetite and a desire to eat cinnamon rolls. Everything will seem deep and have meaning, which means I can finally sit though an episode of NYPD Blue and enjoy it. In high school, a pothead friend of mine said she smoked up and immediately found Weird Al Yankovich attractive.

Anti-drug commercials also tell me that my friends will find my smoking "cool" at first and then as time passes will tell me,"You've gone too far man! Too far! Let's go hang out with those cool college guys that drink beer." In return, I will respond to those people with the pothead anthem, "Whatever dude." That's my pot dream, to respond to whatever anyone says to me with "whatever dude" and mean it.

My problem is that I have no idea where to buy marijuana, it's not like they sell it on the streets. If you're a dealer and you're reading this, let's make one thing clear: you failed miserably in reaching a potential client. I live in Skokie, IL, a Chicago suburb, and not even a semi-dangerous suburb. Known for its Nazi protests during the late 70s and a current band of traveling Skokie-based gypsies that roam from city to city across America, distract gas station attendants and steal from the register, Skokie is a crime-free community mostly made up with a combination of Jews, Russians and Poles. Each day, there's a history lesson outside my window. Unfortunately, it's not the history of pot. I think it's the history of roach bait.

The way I see it, in order to purchase pot, you have to find:

1) Someone whom you know would have access to the drug

2) That person who wouldn't be offended after being asked to become a dealer

3) That person isn't an undercover cop waiting to bust me on a $30 dope charge ruining whatever chances I would have of dating a Christian.

I decided to start looking for potential dealers at work, the natural place to ask around for illegal drugs. I'm employed by a semi-large company where many of the employees are my age. My employer is willing to take on people with little or no experience and pay them large sums of cash. We call this Mecca. One of my co-workers happens to be a slick-haired frat boy, a proud member of Sigma-Kappa something or other. Believing in stereotypes, I have a presumption that he not only smokes weed, but probably grows it under a sophisticated desk lamp system at his apartment, next to the gigantic case of Rolling Rock that is drunk by his nude, gorgeous, sorority chick girlfriend who orally services him upon command and never wonders about marriage.

To me, he's that kind of frat boy - people give him what he wants and kiss his ass because they hope he'll think they're cool. It's very shallow. The problem is, how do I ask him if he rolls up without coming off like the suburban dork that I truly am? After all, I want him to think I'm cool.

He stops by my cubicle on a Monday.

"What's up?" I ask.

"Was up braaa?"

On instinct, I talk to the guy with frat boy rhetoric. "Waz up homes? Whad you do dis weekend?" It's too bad I come off as an early 90s Hispanic street thug.

"I went out to Ohio with my brotha. We watched b-ball and drank beer."

Here's my chance! Where there's beer with frat boys there's... "You smoke up?"

Smoke up? I'm using the phrase smoke up? Smoke Up?! Worse than that: I'm making fun of myself for using the phrase smoke up! You see my problem? There is no way to approach someone for drugs without seeming like a desperate loner. How do people do this in the first place? I understand being approached with drugs - that's fine. That's easy. But to ask for them? It's like trying to get a seat at a fancy restaurant by tipping the maitre d' with a bag of kitty litter.

"Shit..." he replies and he looks away. He's nonchalant about it - maybe he thinks I'm a cop. I don't look like a cop. I'm 5'6". Have there been any 5'6" policemen in the history of law enforcement? On second thought, he thinks I'm a desperate loner.

"Whatchu do?" he spits and asks at the same time.

"Just relaxed." (My way of saying "I have no life. I drowned myself in Comedy Central reruns of Saturday Night Live and Who's Line Is it Anyway? while writing columns about my dire need
to smoke weed.) I had to press on.

"So you ever light up?"
"No, I don't do that shit anymore. You kiddin' me, dawg?" He actually has taken to calling me dawg. This is a step up from last week, when he referred to me as a major home appliance. "That shit messes up yo' mind. Makes you DUMB."

And he was serious. You can tell when a frat boy is being serious when he over- stresses a word. "That woman was HOT," "I got fuckin' TANKED." The frat boy didn't pan out. My one connection to the underworld of marijuana was instead a cheap frat boy D.A.R.E. ad. Why is obtaining illegal drugs so difficult?

There are no other routes. A friend of mine encouraged me to approach homeless men. Certainly, there are several homeless men begging for change in the neighborhood I work in. If anyone knows where to score some pot, it would be these guys. But the problem is, I'm not sure I have the maturity to ask these men for illegal drugs. I spend my whole life getting asked for something from them - that is their role in my life. I'm not sure I could handle it if it was the other way around. Besides, asking them to do something illegal for me would make me something less than the less-than-human person I already am.

I've thought about taking ads out in the newspaper, posting something to an Internet message board or just taking up sniffing inhalants in a plastic bag. None of these are viable options. Posting something on a message board or newspaper might arouse suspicion by an authority figure, and at this time in my life I'm simply not ready to go to jail. Inhalants? I just can't see myself sniffing something I could buy from Wal-Mart and could possibly put me in a coma. Forget the Internet - there's no way I'm shipping a drug through mail. If the post office messes up my amazon.com delivery, imagine what could happen if they screwed up a marijuana shipment.

A college professor once told me, "You'll never be a good writer until you start doing drugs, especially marijuana." I'm sure she was high at the time and her prophecy was loony, but it begs the question - how the hell did she expect me to get these drugs?

-Brandon Stahl