Arden is a writer and artist from Philadelphia. He studied Glass at RISD, and has since spent his time writing novels in Maine, driving forklifts and tractors in Pennsylvania, and surfing in California and Washington. He uses whatever materials he has to tell stories, from comics and zine-making, to low-tech film and low-budget theater, from assemblage sculpture to the written word, adapting found and second-use materials to create work which is made of the detritus of the world it reflects. In this reflection he attempts to paint impressions of an iconoclastic moment of normlessness, beauty, absurdity, and anxiety, where long-held axioms are given their overdue reconsideration, extremist ideologies are surfacing, the apocalypse makes promises on the horizon, and the self is engaged in a deep interrogation of the meaning of things. What does it mean to give your life to work? To have doubts about your cause? To love transgressively? To be out of harmony with how you are socially defined? To be alone? To have community?