There are ways to avoid that unwanted clutter in your templates. I've only tested the following with MySQL, but it's pretty slick. Try it out in a shell: ./foo.pl state=42

use DBI;
use CGI qw(param);
use Template;

my $dbh = DBI->connect( ... );

my $state_id = param('state');
my $states   = $dbh->selectall_arrayref('
   SELECT id,name,
   IF (id = ?, 1, 0) AS selected
   FROM state
',{Slice => {}}, $state_id);

my $tt = Template->new;
$tt->process(\*DATA, {states => $states}) || die $tt->error();

__DATA__
<select name="state">
   <option value="">Pick A State, Any State</option>
   [% FOREACH state = states %]
      [% PROCESS option o = state %]
   [% END %]
</select>

[% BLOCK option %]
   <option value="[% o.id %]"
      name="[% o.name %]"
      selected="[% o.selected %]"
   />
[% END %]
[download]

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)