Author: Adlai Burman

Born in Washington D.C., Adlai Burman now lives and creates in the Czech Republic.
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Epilepsy/MS Confusion — chapter number ?? 🤷‍♂️ — 3 X 2025


OMFG 🙀 aka WTF?! 😳

Forgive the ineloquence; that’s the only way it seems capable of coming out right now.
Apparently I was so out of it last night (manic joy to nonstop needing to pee) that Markéta was really very frightened. At 5:30 this morning, I was perched sitting and quivering on the edge of the bed and was completely unresponsive. She called an ambulance and I was apparently taken off to a hospital — I say “apparently” because I have no recollection of any of this at all. Even though I was transferred between several departments there, it wasn’t until early afternoon that I “came to” to the extent that I was at all self aware. Truth be told: it’s actually Sunday the 5th now.

The past few days have been pretty much lost in a cubist & confused blur. To add some stress to this overwhelming weirdness, the neurologist that examined me (who I don’t even recall seeing, but I believe I did) feels that the culprit is more likely to be MS than epilepsy! This is especially confusing since, if this is the case, I doubt even anti seizure meds will be of much help. To make matters worse, I am so unaware when I seize that my natural reaction to being informed of my having done so is to be completely incredulous. It’s like I imagine I would react if an adult “informed” me that I was Jacques Cousteau. Ultimately I have to rely on otherwise inexplicable things (like having a painfully chewed up tongue) — to realize that I really am in the wake of a full fledged seizure.

The sketch above was quickly scratched out back in February 2020 when I was dealing with being a newly minted epileptic. On one hand, I’m really quite lucky to have been thusly diagnosed as this helped answer a lot of the weirdness of regularly seizing but having no recollection of it. On a different hand, it was really hard to accept that in addition to having M.S., now I had to figure out how to deal with epilepsy on top of that.

In the end, it all comes down to the same thing. Those aspects of this singular life that are a burden — harsh disease, homeland being seized by a popular fascist autocracy, loss of any sort … etc — are difficult. Losing oneself in the shadow of such burdens is, in and of itself, a deep defeat. For me; the goal of the balancing act that I always need to juggle is where I can be aware of these burdens — so I can do whatever I can to help alleviate them — yet, at the same time, not allow them to cow and consume me. far I can get with that.

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Surprising Reassessment of an Old Sketchbook Entry

The very sketchy sketch session

Everything in my field of vision at this urban sketching session back in December 2019 at Luxor Books on Wenceslas Square was surprisingly and, at first, wonderfully kinetic — from the spinning records, to the flurry of holiday shoppers, to the constantly shifting interior lighting affecting and affected by these things. After making a few stabs at trying to navigate a visual foundation with safely erasable graphite, I found that I had spent most of this sketching session noodling around, probing, and just lost and frustrated. If memory serves, I was quite symptomatic that day and that certainly didn’t help matters as it amplified all the visual and cognitive cacophony around and within.

Ultimately I wound up near the end of this sketching session with just a few minutes left to go and nothing to work with but a page of confused thumbnail sketches. The most stable visual available to me was Jan — thanks Jan — who was stolidly perched across from me sketching away so I visually seized on him as my anchor and now — in retrospect — I’m so glad I did 😳

Jan Sketching At Luxor – fountain pen and marker on Khadi paper

Some sketchy clarity on that day found

In retrospect I also now realize that this was all during that time that I was apparently seizing all over the place without being at all aware of it. As I had become mostly homebound by this point nobody knew about it — not even me. I finally seized in public a few weeks later and was hospitalized for a week or so for tests and observation. Turns out MS had been nibbling at my brain stem and turned me into an epileptic. At least I finally understood why sometimes I would find my tongue all chewed up with no explanation.
Silver lining, right?

I’ll take what I can get …

At least things don’t vibrate so much anymore and my tongue is fine 🙂

Plus, this particular sketch holds a lot of unexpected personal reportage for me.

* Q: “Hold up 🖖! Now it’s epilepsy, too?”
A: Umm … 🫤

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Sketchbook Memories of Sketchy Saner Days


I came across this while fumbling through some older sketchbooks. It was sketched during a small outing with a few urban sketcher friends of mine at Cafe Lucerna in Prague. There was a lot of wild arabesque art nouveau architecture to sketch both in the cafe and outside the window onto the Lucerna Passage. For some reason, I ignored all that and just did a quick sketch of my friends, sketching. I gotta say I’m grateful I now have this image of who and how we were back in the new age of innocence.

On the one hand that feels like yesterday. On the other hand, thinking about all that’s changed since February 2018 makes my whole being even wobblier than it might already be. How cloistered and naively safe we were. There was no Covid. The Make America Grate Again nightmare we are surrounded by still seemed like it could believably have been a fluke. Mango Mussolini was widely thought to be manageable. His idol, Vladimir Putin, had not further invaded Ukraine. Artificial intelligence was something comfortably somewhere in the future. It was before Kyle Rittenhouse. Before January 6th. Before mass shootings became a weekly if not daily occurrence back in the States. Elected officials hadn’t been talking about civil war since right before the Civil War. It was before there was a war in Israel. This was even two years before I had the faintest notion that I was epileptic, and … before the outcome of whatever it is that’s going to happen in 2024 happens. Who knows?

Urban Sketchers Sketching at Cafe Lucerna

So much for being younger and out of touch. Back then I never would have spent the better part of my waking hours doomscrolling through issues that I have no control over anyway — accomplishing nothing more than reinforcing the fact that things are even more horrific than I have the capacity to imagine.

Our Cat Learns to Read the News, 2017 – Watercolor 21*30 cm

Hmm 🤔

What to do? I’d like to believe that this chasm of good and bad shit has got to be teaching someone some kind of lessons. Regardless, one’s got to be able to auger some kind of wisdom facing forward. Gotta work on making things good so these days might be good ones to look back on.

“A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.”

James Baldwin

Definitely I’ve got to keep on contributing to my sketchbook journals. The more I sketch truly, the clearer and richer the aesthetic reality of “now” will be rendered for my future eyes to happen on like my eyes happened on this one. Hopefully I’ll figure out the rest in the meantime. Please feel free to let me know if any of my work resonates with you too. Getting feedback from people really helps.

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Poking Out in the World

Taking a Balloon For a Walk

Trying to be clear when 
the day sometimes can’t manage

Days trying to be even while 
It is sometimes not.

and might say grackle like
These all could be

are a decent compromise of
Let’s say,
A compromise. 
-Lewis Dhansejbal

I just recently got hold of some Roher & Klingner fast drying SketchInk™ . That, combined with a few Faber-Castell Polychromous™ colored pencils, has made revisiting some ink line sketches a lot of fun and full of surprises.

Taking a Granite Balloon Out For a walk

Full Disclosure: For whatever it’s worth, I’m not supported by either of these companies and am certain that neither one knows that I exist.

Now …where was I?

I’ve got oodles of pocket A6 sketchbooks I keep in almost every pocket of my clothing and book bags … not to mention strewn around my nightstand. These are so liberating to just throw down quick sketches while waiting in line somewhere or sitting on a rickety tram or just scribbling out thumbnail ideas or just scribbling for the hell of it in bed or almost anywhere else.

This format lets me sketch without being distracted or intimidated by the possibility of anything like a finished work resulting in the end.

I guess that should be the idea with all of my sketchbooks regardless of size. They’re sketchbooks. Dedicated to sketching. I’ll just have to agree that I have trouble remembering that … and, that so many things in general would be better if I didn’t*.

So …

… the ink handles really well in both dip pen and brush. The colors are bold expressions of mostly unsaturated pigments — think assertive earth tones? 🤔.

They do seem to handle differently than most inks I’ve used. The fact that they dry much more quickly than any other drawing ink I’m used to makes them great for working on some of my sketchbooks that are not designed for wet applications. This fast drying process also leads to a variety of outcomes for subsequent layers. Like watercolor, it’s fun and thrilling trying to control — or at least interact with — it.

I’ve also heard that the SketchInk™ family of drawing inks mix quite well with each other which doesn’t surprise me. The muted nature of these colors makes me guess that they’re unlikely to overpower one another. I only have two of them (Frieda and Thea) so … **

* English teacher’s note to self: gotta love the flexibility of those auxiliary verbs

** I’ve got to take a break mid sentence here. I’ll finish that thought and this post sometime soon, I hope 🤞 Please feel free to remind me if I haven’t.