A WISE MAN once said that a cluttered desk is the sign of a brilliant, active mind. And the reason the wise man said this is that people kept coming into his office and saying Oh my god—LOOK AT YOUR DESK! And frankly, I’d had just about enough of that.

Now I would like to update this irrefutable truism to read as follows:

Any mess that I make, anywhere, is a certain indication of how amazing and full of vitality I am.

When I’m not at my desk of nuclear Armageddon writing this (let’s be honest) killer blogstuff, I’m cheffing it, over here in the kitchen.

I mean, just look at this stove. The aesthetic richness of it is telling you I am about to cook something amazing for my family, like I do every day. Just like I’m adding daily aesthetic richness to my desk and my living room and, well, pretty much everything in sight.

But there’s one little request I want to make of the kitchen appliance people out there who read this little blog of mine, just to smooth the way a bit for my culinary genius. And it’s this.

My brain is too stupid to understand your weird symbols. Please help!

Take these knobs for instance. How am I supposed to know which knob is which burner? To my brain, these burner indicator symbols are in Klingon or something, and I live in constant fear that I’ll activate the wrong one and my house will burn down, and I’ll trigger an intergalactic war between Romulans, the Borg, and the Frigidaire people.

Here’s how my life works.

I’m doing, like, ten things at once. And number eleven is me cooking something on the stove. See, in the picture above, how there are all these indicators of genius on my stove top? Exactly. So I put the pot on a burner, and turn on the knob for the burner, and then go to deal with one of the other eleven things—scrubbing the toilet or doing laundry or finishing a rush job for a client, or washing the dishes or even all of the above. Usually all of the above.

Then there’s this little voice in my head that says, hey, dum-dum: did you actually turn on the burner you think you did?

Then I come back to the kitchen to find this.

There are so many things in my house now with these rings on it that I’m thinking of maybe making this a kitchen motif, like how for years everything in my grandmother’s house had watermelons on it. Not because she liked watermelons that much. In fact, she didn’t. One day she bought something with a watermelon pattern, and everyone who came to the house after that thought to themselves, Hey, Elma likes watermelons.

Pretty soon, my grandmother’s kitchen looked like she was the leader of an extreme religious cult that was convinced the god Citrullus lanatus would be coming back soon, in a spaceship, to save them.

I’m not there—yet. But here is my latest addition to my line of products I’m calling Elements by Wayne.™

In case you can’t tell, it is a reusable lunch bag with my motif jauntily hand-emblazoned on the bottom. Unlike my competitors’ lunch bags, this one now has a handy vent in the bottom to facilitate fresh air exchange.

Dear appliance makers: here are some suggested stove top labels, to help prevent Intergalactic Klingon-Confederation Armageddon.

My brain is able to get all of these, but I especially like the last one. That’s because I can just point to it, and then say to my family, it’s not me—the stove is saying so. In fact, I might just get a Sharpie and write it there myself.

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