As I sit down to write this column, something doesn’t feel quite right. I have started to have bouts of heartburn which drive me crazy. I know I shouldn’t eat certain things at certain times, but can’t help myself.

So I try and take it easy the next morning with a nagging pain in my gut. Getting old stinks.

The good thing is that I know it will go away. I know I can modify my habits. I know I will feel better soon. I wish I could say the same for my mental faculties.

I haven’t become more forgetful or started to deal with bouts of confusion. I still make it home safely at the end of the day. The problem is that, once I make it home, my daughter may want to play a game. That’s the part which makes me start to feel really bad about myself.

Usually she just wants to play “Sorry!” This is a family favorite which has spawned some epic battles over the years, but no real bad blood. Sometimes she chooses “Life” or “Battleship,” both of which pass the time and really just come down to luck.

But lately she has started to choose an older game which has really made me question my worth as a father, a husband and a contributing member of the community.

Bridget likes to challenge me to games of “Connect Four.”

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Groucho Marx once quipped that he wouldn’t join any club which would have him as a member. Sometimes I feel that way. Who would want my brand of insanity and self-doubt?

But recently, I found a group that not only seemed to fit my personality, but, by some miracle, they also wanted me.

I am talking about the Dollar Shave Club. This decision will change my life.

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Two summers ago, I re-read Bret Easton Ellis’ novel “Less Than Zero.” I wanted to revisit the 1985 novel before I read Ellis’ newest book “Imperial Bedrooms,” which is a sequel to the tale of L.A. excess.

The library had a long waiting list for the book, and I never got around to buying a copy. Eventually, it fell off my radar. A couple of weeks ago, I wandered around the library as my wife and daughter looked for their books and saw a copy of “Imperial Bedrooms” on the shelf and had to grab it.

Now I’m not sure if that was such a good idea after all. In my review of “Less Than Zero” in 2010, I said:

The one thing I realized from re-reading the book is that Ellis simultaneously managed to produce something vapid and ground breaking. I forgot the absurd excess of the characters framed by Ellis’ flowing prose. You could almost feel yourself moving along, herky jerky, with these lost souls.

“Imperial Bedrooms” has the prose and the herky-jerky feel, but you don’t really know why you should care. The original featured lost teenagers in a hedonistic society which left them to fend for themselves with no moral compass. The sequel simply shows that they are still shallow jerks. And that’s on a good day.

Ellis could probably write about this cast in his sleep, and 180-some pages later, it appears as he did. The book felt like a lazy gimmick. Simply showing that people with problems never solved those problems and went on to worse problems because that’s the kind of world they live in does not count as character development.

This disdain doesn’t even get into the eye-rolling climax which not only left me wondering what had happened, but what the previous pages actually meant. I could only shake my head and quote Josh Baskin: “I don’t get it.”

The good thing is that Ellis’ ability as a writer provides a quick pace and manages to get to the point, whatever it is, in less than 200 pages. I don’t really recommend “Imperial Bedrooms,” but if you give it a shot, it shouldn’t take up too much of your time. Frankly, I’d just suggest reading “Less Than Zero” twice.

This story from the New York Post caught my eye online today because I sometimes use Spotify. The music service intrigued me because I have struggled with finding something which lets me stream/play my favorite music on multiple devices. While I like Spotify, I’m not surprised their attempts to hook people into a paid service has mostly failed.

Right now, I have music playing on my work computer through Google Play. This is the player hooked up to their cloud service. I have 4,627 songs available with absolutely no restrictions. OK, now I have 4.626 songs available because something I had downloaded for my daughter just showed up in my shuffle play, the hazards of simply adding all the songs from your hard drive to the cloud. Regardless of how many Victoria Justice songs I have to delete when they play, I have all my music in one place, including my R.E.M. bootlegs. Before anyone screams “piracy,” the band has a pretty open policy in letting fans share live recordings.

Using Google Play does mean I might end up with spotty song information – I just listened to a version of 1,000,000 which I think came from their 2007 live rehearsals in Dublin, but I’m not sure what night – but I can deal with that. That also means I have variable audio levels, my biggest complaint about the Google interface, but hardly a dealbreaker. I first tried the Amazon Cloud Player, but hated how you had to go to the Cloud Drive to change information on a song, something I do when a file plays but doesn’t indicate the artist or song title. Google makes that function much more seamless.

With Spotify, I get all the correct song information, a stable audio level and access to some songs I may not have in my library, but that doesn’t quite cover things for me. Sure, I’m not going to listen to all 4,000 plus songs, but I like having them accessible. With Spotify, I can access “local files” from my hard drive, but I don’t have all my music on a hard drive at work and have eliminated music from my laptop hard drive since I can access it from the cloud.

I still crank up Spotify once in a while. I made some pretty fun playlists on there and don’t mind the brief ads, but I have found myself drifting more and more to the cloud where I have music I have paid for and/or curated. Some people may find Spotify something they want to pay for, but I have already put a lot of time and money into my music and don’t see why I need to pony up for their service.

In “Groundhog Day,” one of my favorite movies, Phil Connors picks an enjoyable day from his past and wonders, “Why couldn’t I get that day over, and over, and over….”

Now I don’t want to make it sound like I am stuck in an endless loop at this point in my life, but I look back to what I was doing 20 years ago today and wonder if I could get that day over and over and over.

Less than two years out of college, a short period of unemployment had just ended when I accepted a job in Hanover. While that does rank up there because it led me to my wife and all the wonderful things which have happened over the past two decades, April 3, 1992 stands out for a different reason.

Baltimore opened its new baseball stadium that day. Read More »

The continued cultural importance of the 1980s doesn’t completely make sense. I know that as my generation grows older, the nostalgia for our youth gains strength. But the continued fascination with “The Breakfast Club” and The Go-Go’s has to survive on more than memories.

I understood this phenomena a little better after reading Rob Sheffield’s memoir/80′s homage “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran.” Sheffield, a long-time Rolling Stone writer, takes you through the decade that won’t die via his experiences with each chapter built around a song.

Given that the author and I seem to have tread lots of similar territory (and one of my first instincts was to create a playlist from the songs which inspired each chapter), I had no choice but to love this book. I have connections to many of the songs. It doesn’t matter that I don’t drift towards all of them because the angst and confusion and exploration that went with the time rang completely true to me. I just connect some of those feelings with “Stone Cold Yesterday” by The Connells instead of “Hangin’ Tough” by New Kids on the Block.

However, every generation can overstate the importance of their youth. I can’t wait until 30 years from now when kids roll their eyes as their parents go on and on about how life changed thanks to a Taylor Swift song or iCarly episode. I really hope I live that long just so I can laugh.

But the 80s really did mean something. In the chapter dedicated to the Psychedelic Furs song “Pretty in Pink,” he examines why the movies of John Hughes and other 80s directors continue to resonate today. This has to be a real things since academic books have developed from this idea.

It’s a sign of how 1980s teen culture keeps on resonating – even people who were born in the ’90s can O.D. on borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’80s. Maybe that’s because it was an era when teen trash was the only corner of pop culture that wasn’t a high-gloss fraud. Movies for adults sucked in the 1980s and music for adults sucked even worse ….

Now that’s a gross over-generalization, but the movies nominated for Best Picture from 1984 (the year “16 Candles” was released) were Amadeus, The Killing Fields, A Passage to India, Places in the Heart and A Soldier’s Story. And don’t even get me started on the Grammy’s.

But the notion that art aimed at teens drove pop culture in the 1980s is almost undeniable. Sheffield does a wonderful job at capturing how that reality helped define individual personalities and change American culture.

I try to help around the house as much as I can. My limited skills (and interest) disqualify me from many chores, but I still like to think I contribute to the common good.

The other night I could see that my wife just needed a break. She had a busy week. I needed to step up my game.

Lucky for me, the task Maria needed help with ranked up there as one of my favorites – grocery shopping.

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As white people everywhere know, “Mad Men” returns to the air on Sunday. We have suffered silently and whitely for more than 500 days.

Well, not all of us. I was a latecomer to the AMC franchise. I still have not finished Season 4 (I have one episode left) since I didn’t feel any sense of urgency until the new season rapidly approached.

Now that the time has arrived for Don Draper and his whiskey-soaked goodness to lighten up our lives, I’m considering which approach I should take to keep up with the series since I have watched all the previous seasons on DVD or via Netflix Streaming.

The easy way out is to record them on a DVR and watch them when I get a chance at home. The problem is that I don’t want to feel like I have to watch each week and I don’t want to watch just at home. Most of Season 4 has helped me get through lunches at work.

So I think I will take the new $10 credit in my Amazon account (thanks to an AmazonLocal deal which sold them for just $5) and buy a Season pass for their streaming video service. This way, I can watch at work online or at home via my Roku or Tivo.

I’m not ready to completely cut the cord from cable, but I hope that broadcasters add things like this into the equation. With so many outstanding television shows out there, viewers can make choices on how they consume their favorite shows. Sometimes sitting down when the broadcast takes place just doesn’t work.

I have to give my wife credit. She only wanted to try something different and make dinner a little more healthy.

A month or so ago, Maria found a recipe for bean burgers. When I saw it laying around the kitchen, I started to laugh.

Bean burgers sounded like something a group of people in a mountain commune would eat for a special occasion. That didn’t fit my profile.

But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. As we get older, we do have to pay more attention to the things we eat.

I already try to limit the amount of red meat I eat. Every once in a while, I will go for turkey burgers to try and mix things up. Why not bean burgers?

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A lot of people have placed an undue focus on 2012 because they think the Mayans predicted the world would end later this year.

We can accomplish very little by sitting and talking about the absurdity of an ancient culture using some stone tablet thousands of years ago to accurately predict the apocalypse. We’d probably be funnier than the skit “Saturday Night Live” did on it a couple of months ago, but that’s not important right now.

What’s important is how this whole doomsday discussion has missed the one truly amazing thing about the 2012 calendar, a special alignment which happens this week.

The first two days of March Madness fall directly prior to St. Patrick’s Day, which falls on a Saturday.

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