Our U.S. election process is about as sophisticated as a high school’s. The way it now operates, we the people are not given a choice in terms of leadership abilities but rather chicanery skills. Each campaign may start out to educate and inform but in the end the candidates are dragged down into the mud where they are forced to stay alive by throwing at each other handfuls of what they’re stuck in, while lying, obfuscating, misrepresenting and generally messing with our minds. Is this a way to elect someone to lead or represent us?

You’d think with all the technology taking over our lives we would understand more about our surroundings and stumble over them less. But since we are all looking down at some device most of the time, with earbuds keeping out all distracting sounds of humanity, it’s little wonder we don’t crash a tea party or fall down a rabbit hole every so often. I suppose an even bigger distraction now are cyber security threats that could compromise our way of living, zap the national electrical grid and empty our bank accounts.

The other morning I ambled down Main street into the town center of Vineyard Haven with my noble yellow lab Floyd. We stopped at his usual oasis, the generously filled water bowl outside The Green Room, and the lapping commenced. He usually doesn’t stop drinking until his bladder assumes the proportion of water associated with that of the Earth’s surface.

Martha’s Vineyard is a perfect place to start a life. Especially in the fall. A time for renewal. A time to re-tool. The next best thing to moving here is marrying here. The perfect place to start a life — together.

A generation ago, Angela Lansbury spent 264 television episodes as Jessica Fletcher, an Agatha Christie-style detective who solved murders for the most part right in her own backyard, the sleepy rural town of Cabot Cove, Me. Two observations occurred to me: why would anyone hang out with Jessica once you realize that wherever she is someone gets murdered? And what’s the matter with Cabot Cove, a little fishing village that has a violent crime wave commensurate with Chicago?

The Food and Drug Administration is now dealing with a suit regarding false and misleading information in a case against Chobani, the Greek yogurt company, for listing “evaporated cane juice” as a major ingredient in its pomegranate-flavored yogurt. The FDA has the power to regulate product labeling and can ask for a change if it deems a rule violation has been committed.

"Nature abhors a vacuum." Aristotle said that or something like that in the original ancient Greek, observing that nature requires every space to be filled with something, even if that something is colorless, odorless air or house guests.

The flip side of this observation is that empty spaces are unnatural as they go against the laws of nature and physics. So kindly fill your chairs, sofas and beds with people whose company is compatible. You don’t want the science police knocking on your door and inquiring about unfilled spaces.

If you haven’t heard about the latest incendiary human who used an arsenal of firearms to blow away a dozen Colorado moviegoers as well as injure nearly five dozen more, then you must be living under a rock. And if that’s where you are, then if I were you, I’d stay there. That’s probably the last safe place in America.

It was the right thing to do.

This past April we sold our primary residence outside of Boston and moved the proverbial lock, stock and what seemed like 47 barrels to Vineyard Haven. At the same time, we told friends that we also intended to sell the house we’ve had in Menemsha for 24 years. We decided it was time to live permanently on this Island. But the only way we could seriously entertain that notion was to live within walking distance of a town that breathed life more than four months of the year.

Human nature cannot be studied in cities except at a disadvantage — a village is the place. There you can know your man inside and out — in a city you but know his crust; and his crust is usually a lie.” So wrote Mark Twain more than a century ago.

After living in the village of Vineyard Haven full-time for the past 15 months, I see signs of cracking in my crust. Whole pieces are falling off. Life is looser here. Truth pads around on little fur feet, lapping up the crust dust. And where Truth lurks, karma is just around the corner.