Rapper Snoop Dogg changed his name to Snoop Lion.

Know how I found out?

My tweeps told me.

A "tweep" is one of the "peeps" you know on Twitter. "Peeps," by the way, is young guy for "people."

I'm not a young guy anymore. I'm 55, and I figure I'm maybe four years away from wearing a belt and suspenders at the same time. This is not a matter of concern. I always expected to get older, and I expect to eventually die, though I'll try everything I can to get out of dying.

When I'm not writing this column, I'm working union hours as a reporter/columnist for The Herald News, the newspaper of record in Fall River, Mass., a city of 88,000 people, some of whom are my tweeps.

Newspapers not being immune to either fad or the profit motive, I was informed a couple of months ago that the paper wanted me to set up a Twitter account and start "tweeting."

This news I received without so much as a groan. They ask you to do stuff at work. When I was a hotel janitor, they asked me to wear an orange, brown and cream polyester uniform that assumed the texture and weight of soaked seaweed if you sweat into it even a little. I wore the damn thing because I wanted to keep cashing the $3.35-an-hour paycheck that came with the terrible uniform.

Those in charge at the paper said that I should tweet my stories (or at least the opening sentence) and that I should "follow" politicians, police departments and other potential news sources.

Some of this I did. I tweeted the first sentence of some of my stories, but I could not stand to follow politicians. I began to tweet odd things I'd seen as I drove from assignment to assignment. Two junkies fighting on a street corner. A guy inexplicably wearing a sombrero on a New England side street.

And then some kid up at the high school, no doubt some little annoyance of a journalism nerd, started following me on Twitter. Then, because all these kids have at least 200 tweeps, other younger people started following me.

And I started to know who Joe Budden was, and I looked at some of his lyrics — his and rapper Lil Wayne's — and I think it changed the way I wrote, gave me some more flow, a little less heaviness in the sentence structure.

Picked up some new slang, too, and though I didn't reply to their tweets, I read the tweets of kids, poor kids, working kids, a tweet from some kid whose cousin (one of my tweeps) had just violated his parole and gone back to the joint over some drug business. Kid's 23, and it's his second time in the cage.

And the lovelorn jumped out of the computer, tweeting intense romantic pain I hadn't known since the "teen" faded from the back end of my age.

"He never listened when I told him how I felt about him," a girl tweeted. She's 19.

"If you're going to completely shut me out of your life, don't be surprised when I shut you out of mine," a 16-year-old boy tweeted.

Love's old sweet song. Digitized.

These kids have seen more porn than I had at their age, and they talk like it; but the love harpoon still pierces their fresh, young hearts, and the cliched pain talk sounds just like mine did, what, 40 years ago?

They talk "blacker" than I ever did at their age, but, in and of itself, writing "though" as "doe" and using "y'all" when you're a New England white boy isn't any dopier than the dopey "faaaar out" of my middle-school years.

And I signed up to follow Hasids, Catholic saint of the day, Buddha quote of the day and a Shiite who explains the commands of Muhammad. Me and my tweeps are all about diversity.

If I were running for something — president, say — I'd set up a Twitter account, not in my own name, and I'd get a bunch of under-20 followers and just listen to this young country.

They're falling in love, and they're joining the Marines, and they're going to jail.

Hearing it doesn't make you younger, but it makes you KNOW.

And old guys like us, we're not supposed to be able to love all night anymore.

But we're supposed to know.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.