Keep on driving south. You're barely halfway through the state! Now you're in the retirement heartland, flanked on either side by endless beaches and equally endless resorts. Keep on driving. You're entering the territory of Carl Hiaasen -- the deranged Miami Herald journalist whose novels are considered outlandishly absurd only by people who haven't lived in the state for more than a week. The farther south you get, the harder it is to find a Southern accent. You start running into your Jewish émigrés from New York and Castro haters from Cuba. Finally, you're in Miami, which might as well be the capital of another country altogether. But is it "Miami Vice"-land you've arrived in, or Little Havana? Who calls the cultural tune here? The fading echo of rappers 2 Live Crew, or the ascendant Latin beat of Gloria Estefan?

And you're still not at the end. You've got the whole length and breadth of the Keys, stretching away into the Caribbean. You've got Jimmy Buffett drifting offshore, searching for that lost shaker of salt. You don't have any Florida panthers prowling the swamp anymore, but there's no shortage of armadillos and alligators. And then finally, you can go no further -- you're in Key West, alone at the very southernmost tip, a cultural continent's distance from the edges of the Okefenokee Swamp.

And what do you make of it all, now that you've reached the end of the line? The rest of the United States vents into Florida -- but where does Florida's pent-up craziness escape to?

Nowhere. That's the problem: There's no outlet for Florida's insanity. So Floridians are forced to turn in upon themselves -- to seek their saviors in Mickey Mouse or fundamentalist Christianity or endless surf or coke and dope and heroin. And then, perpetually unsatisfied, they writhe in a never-ending identity crisis. Are they Republicans or Democrats? Culturally conservative or swinging liberals? Environmentalist defenders of the Everglades or the most rapacious developers in the world?

There's no answer for Florida. No wonder its indecisiveness has plunged an entire nation into confusion. And no matter how many times the votes are recounted, they'll never add up to anything that makes any sense.

Maybe instead of calling for that recount, we should just amputate the peninsula and cut our losses, and let the state float away as its own crazy island. Or maybe nature will take care of it for us. Maybe Florida is just killing time while it awaits the mother of all hurricanes, that great final storm that will wash all the madness away.

But that would be a pity. Our national weirdnesses need to go somewhere, so why not someplace warm and, usually, friendly? Florida is whacked out, but you've got to love it for that. You have to respect a state that doesn't know what it is or where it's going.

I know I do. Watching the election returns last night, I realized I've been in California too long. I miss those palmetto bushes, those hippie-chasing rednecks, those clear cold springs and warm, lascivious ocean waves. I even miss the flinty-eyed seniors ready to run me out of town on a rail.

And, boy, do I miss the opportunity to vote in the state that I still think of as home.

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