In the decades since Miami Herald columnist and novelist Carl Hiaasen was born in Florida in 1953, the state’s population has more than quintupled. Since he began writing about his surroundings at the age of six, when his father gave him a typewriter, the news has only gotten stranger.

For context, follow Florida Man's Twitter postings about truly bizarre happenings in the Sunshine State. Highlights among the parody account's real headlines (all of which must begin with the words "Florida Man") include:

Florida Man Busted For Performing Back Alley Butt Injections; Florida Man Shoots Himself In Crotch With Flare Gun; Florida Man Arrested For Giving Wedgies. Just last week, Florida Man told cops he wanted to smoke a joint before he was arrested.

Florida Man is just an average Joe in Hiaasen's latest book, Dance of the Reptiles: Rampaging Tourists, Marauding Pythons, Larcenous Legislators, Crazed Celebrities, and Tar-Balled Beaches, edited by Diane Stevenson and available tomorrow.

In this collection of the best of Hiaasen's Herald columns, he comments on the beautiful and bizarre world surrounding him, never missing an opportunity to skewer the state's corrupt politicians, greedy developers, bumbling tourists, and law evaders. The most colorful among them often seem to end up at the end of the road -- in Key West, the southernmost point in the United States and setting for much of Hiaasen's most recent novel, Bad Monkey.

At the Key West Literary seminar earlier this month, Hiaasen had a packed house in stitches during an address called “The Florida Freak Show” (listen to the full audio here), in which he lampooned everyday happenings stranger than any fiction. There was the woman who caused an accident on the dangerous U.S. 1, distracted by shaving her bikini area while driving. She was en route to see a boyfriend, and her ex-husband held the steering wheel as she did her business, said the arresting officer, who once pulled over another erratic driver with three syringes sticking out his arm. Also, the case of the Florida man who had a thing for his pet goat, Meg, and was prosecuted over a five-year process for consorting with her.

Although Hiaasen and his KWLS audience laughed until it hurt at the expense of these characters, his love for the "incredible, beautiful place" where he lives goes deeper than any cynicism. "It's about why we fight for it," he said. "Why we try to get them to stop building houses with Triscuits and Elmer's Glue."

In a “Fresh Air” interview on NPR last year, broadcast around the publication of Bad Monkey, the author recalled growing up in Florida during an era before strip malls or any mass development at all:

“And so every day, I'd get home from school and get on my bike, and I'd just ride really a mile or two out and be right on the edge of the Everglades. And it was the best childhood imaginable.”

He also described the joy he finds as an adult fishing in the Keys, seeing dolphins and turtles everywhere in a view that gives him something to fight for. "It's the reason you don't give up despite all the, you know, the madness and the insanity and the corruption, which is just...multiplying with each new generation of arrivals."

If the beauty that inspired Hiaasen to write as a child still exists, we have him to thank for preserving it in such funny, direct, disturbing, and stirring language.