Find What Catches You on Fire—and Burn for the Rest of Your Life🔥🧘💸

Published: Sun, 01/04/26

Updated: Sun, 01/04/26

"Catch on fire with enthusiasm and people will come for miles to watch you burn." John Wesley

Author Charles Bukowski was no role model in the traditional sense, but he was one of the realest people I’ve ever read about. He said many things that made people uncomfortable. One in particular that gets misquoted, misunderstood, and usually dismissed as nihilistic bravado is this. He wrote: “Find what you love and let it kill you.”

Most people hear destruction in that line. Chaos. Addiction. Self-sabotage. That’s the cheap interpretation.

I think it's gangster.

Bukowski wasn’t glorifying ruin. He was naming a truth most people avoid. Life is going to wear you down anyway. Time will take its share. Energy will fade. Comfort will cost you something. The only real choice you have is what you allow to consume you.

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A Burning Passion Can Never be Put Out.

You can slowly be eroded by a safe, numb existence that leaves you feeling nothing. Or you can be willingly spent by something that makes you feel brutally alive.

Reframe the word kill. Replace it with consume your focus. Let something matter so deeply that it burns through your excuses. Let it rearrange your priorities. Let it demand your best hours, not your leftovers.

That thing doesn’t have to be art.

It might be raising your children with intention. Building something useful. Creating a refuge others can lean on. Solving problems no one else wants to touch. Writing code, stories, policies, systems. The form doesn’t matter. The engagement does.

The Intergalactic Catwalk Challenge: Alien Fashion Has Landed.

“They don’t just wear the future. They are the future.”

🪐 The Premise:

On the runways of cosmic metropolises — from the floating markets of Nubia-6 to the asteroid citadels of Neo-Kumasi — alien fashion models dominate the scene.

These beings don’t just model clothes.
They channel forgotten lineages, wear molecularly programmed fabrics, and alter their form to match the mood of the music.
Their movements collapse timelines. Their presence ignites political uprisings.
And every one of them traces their origin to Earth’s lost continent: Afra-Terra — a splinter dimension shaped by ancestral African dreams.

Some of them wear nothing.
Others wear sentient silks, ink-coded scarification, or biotech woven from memory strands.

The question is:
What does your alien model wear — and why?

🎥 The Challenge

VISUAL ENTRY (Required)
Create a full-body image of your Afrofuturist alien fashion model.
They must be otherworldly — yet unmistakably African in style, rhythm, or essence.

Use AI, freehand, digital illustration, collage, or 3D

Include futuristic or symbolic accessories (e.g. ancestral data tattoos, anti-gravity gele, sound-reactive fabric)

Optional: Pose your model mid-stride, mid-shift, or mid-transmission

TEXT ENTRY (Required)
Write a 250–300 word fashion dossier or catwalk profile that answers:

Name & origin planet/dimension

What they wear (or refuse to)

What makes them a standout in the fashion multiverse

A quote or thought from the model before they step onto the runway

Optional: Their impact on culture, rebellion, diplomacy, or tech

A magazine profile (Intergalactic Style Digest, 2188)

A leaked designer memo

A fan post from a cult fashion blog

🧠 Afrofuturist Angle:

This challenge reclaims fashion as ancestral storytelling — woven with cosmic geometry, African futurisms, and the tech-weaving wisdom of our lineages.
Your models don't just look stunning — they speak to legacy, land, and the next evolution of identity.

🏆 Prizes:

🥇 First Place: $50 + full feature + animated character video (if possible) + inclusion in The Intergalactic Fashion Codex PDF

🥈 Second Place: $25 + feature in newsletter

🥉 Third Place: $10 + mention in the "Holographic Highlights" visual reel

Select entries may appear in:

An Urban Fantastic art zine

A digital “Alien Vogue” reel

The AI-generated Intergalactic Runway Show (let’s build this!)

📬 Submit to: marksmanstudios1@gmail.com
Subject line: "Alien Fashion Model Submission."
Attach your image and/or paste your write-up in the email.

📅 Deadline: 25th January 2026

Attach your art + text entry. You may include your social handle if you'd like to be tagged.

What Bukowski was warning against wasn’t effort.
It was a dull life.

A life padded with comfort, soaked in compromise, delayed by “maybe later.” That kind of existence doesn’t hurt much—until one day it hurts all at once.

There’s a reason some people produce work that feels alive. Take Pablo Picasso. Over nearly 8 decades, he created close to 150,000 works. That wasn’t balanced. That was devotion. He didn’t hoard his gift. He spent it.

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Your fire isn’t meant to be preserved like a museum piece.
It’s meant to be used up.

This is the part people resist. Everything that makes you come alive will cost you something. Time. Energy. Comfort. Certainty. If you’re lucky, it will demand more than you think you have. That’s how you know it’s real.

What you love isn’t a hobby. It’s not a side-interest. It’s a responsibility. Because it’s the most honest expression of who you are. Ignoring it isn’t neutral. It’s a quiet betrayal.

And the quickest way to silent self-destruction.

The thing that burns you strips away what doesn’t matter. Your ego. Your need for approval. Your fear of looking foolish. What’s left is elemental. The part of you that loses track of time. The part that keeps going even when no one’s watching.

Bukowski wasn’t asking you to self-destruct.
He was asking you to choose your sacrifice.

Every life demands one.

You can sacrifice what you love for security. Sometimes that’s necessary. Seasons exist. But when the opportunity appears—when something keeps calling you back—pay attention. That pull isn’t random. It’s information.

Friedrich Nietzsche said, “One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” Fear usually shows up when you’re standing near something that matters. The edge always feels unstable.

You don’t need to blow up your life overnight. You just need to stop pretending you don’t know what you love. You do. You’ve always known.

If you follow it, it will take pieces of you. But it gives something rare in return—a life that feels real. One with fewer regrets.

Many people merely exist. It’s safe. It barely hurts. Until it does.

Or you can give yourself to something that asks everything of you. Something you’d pursue even if no one ever noticed.

Time is taking your years regardless. You’re already spending your life on something. Be intentional about where it goes.

As Mary Oliver warned, the deepest regret belongs to those who felt the call—and never answered it.

Choose the fire.

Anything else is just killing time.

Peace, love and power.

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P.S Would you be so kind to take 2 minutes to leave me a quick review of any books below that you have read? It would help immensely.

Thank you.

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