Now is not the time for recriminations. Not yet. I can feel shithouse about this outcome at a later point when I’m more focused on a solution. Now is a time for reflection—not to gaze at the world distorted within the lenses themselves, though—because this offers a chance to reclaim a sense of perspective.

My desire to understand this thing called fashion, its nuances and excesses, was reflexively engaged the moment these glasses hit the bluestone cobbles which were their final undoing. For some reason, I was not immediately upset—neither annoyed nor saddened—but looking at them on the ground I felt merely like I had broken a tool (perhaps not unlike dropping a phone—I’ve never broken one so I can’t speak to that particular experience) rather than lost an article of clothing or perhaps a signifier of a meta-identity manifest in an accessory.

Sometimes I wonder if I am the best vessel for this particular journey. Fashion is of interest to me as an artistic endeavour rather than as an aspect of my own desire to emulate its expression. I would much prefer a quiet contemplation of some fetishistic leather ensemble on a mannequin than spend any time considering what might look good on my own physical form. Have no illusions: I seek to understand fashion, but not to be fashionable.

The greatest irritation I feel is the difficulty with which this particular item was chosen; dozens considered, none were suitable. Then, right at the climax of The Sunglassiad, this extraordinarily expensive solution fell — as if by providence or deus ex luxuria or by the arcane workings of some high-end advertisement I had never laid eyes upon — into my hands.

Truth be told, I loathe the procurement process and the bright, hyper-sensory overload of the shopping centre in particular. Expense is secondary but with summer approaching the necessary drudgery cannot be circumvented indefinitely. This burned land of our great ancestors is unforgiving on the naked eye. After all, it dries out the scrub and sears the unconditioned pallid skin and even the breath of the hot breeze sends us scuttling inside to bow before the hallowed and chill-fingered nemesis of summer: that ever-humming, energy-gorged, reverse-cycle demigod we so venerate.

You never know, the shades might make a decent reason for some bullshit metaphor, or a fleet-minded installation or something. I might squeeze some kind of symbolism out of the event and fashion the detritus as an icon of the decadence of an age in which loss is counted not in value-as-meaning but value-as-dollar.