Best. State. Ever.

In case you’re wondering how the local political establishment feels about a strip club operating in the middle of the main tourist area, here’s a fact you may find helpful: The owner of the Red Garter is Mick Rossi, who is a Key West city commissioner.

• Florida’s government is divided into three branches: the executive, the judicial and the criminal.

He is a tall, trim, sinewy man with a full beard, a deep voice and a handshake that would crush a coconut. He could be a testosterone donor.

There comes a time in a man’s life when a man must man up and be a man by summoning up his manhood and doing something manly.

Key West, the end of the road, the most flamboyant, decadent, debauched and pungent place in the Florida.

Key West is Florida’s Florida—the place way down at the bottom where the weirdest of the weird end up; the place where the abnormal is normal.

Suddenly, I noticed something: my wallet and keys are exactly where I left them. So either the spirits decided not to move them or—we cannot rule this out – they moved them and then moved them back.

This genre of music is called Electronic Dance Music, or sometimes Club Music, or sometimes just Loud Unimaginative Absurdly Repetitious Boring Music, because—follow me closely here—it sucks. That is only my opinion, of course; taste in music is subjective. It is possible that you like Electronic Dance Music, in which case you are wrong because it sucks.

I am a huge fan of females as a gender, but they tend to display baffling lack of enthusiasm for violent destruction. Show me a group of individuals who are spending a Sunday afternoon entertaining themselves by using explosives to blow up, say, major appliances, and I will show you a group of males.

• Under Florida’s “stand your ground” law, it is legal to shoot anybody for any reason as long as you are standing on the ground.

On any given night, Key West’s main party drag, lower Duval Street, makes Bourbon Street look like Sesame Street.

To begin with, sponges are not plants. They are multicelled animals, although they have no mouth, internal organs, brains or nervous systems. They cannot move, but they can reproduce, eat, grow and obtain Florida driver’s licenses.

I’m kidding about that last one, sort of.

• Roughly eight of these people understand the purpose of the turn signal.

• More than 1,000 people move to Florida every day.