Read Harvey Pekar and you know you have an ally. That there's someone else, on the other side of the world maybe, but there nonetheless with his grouchiness and depressions. With the everyday, great and looming - that same everyday everyone likes to pretend does not exist, has no kind of consistency. That of catching the bus to work, of arguing with someone from another department at work, of queuing up behind security in the airport ...: the everyday with its frustrations, its little impossibilities but also its alliances, its breathers.
Allies - isn't that what we want? Breathers - oh for a breather, a pause, a cigarette break ... And don't you wish you smoked just so you could take a cigarette break? ... only they've pushed them all outside the gates now, you can't smoke anywhere ...
And that's what Harvey Pekar is, an ally ... But then all he's done is double up the world - is narrate what happens today, yesterday and every day ... Double it up, and, reading, it's as though my life were doubled up, too - I live everything Pekar-ishly; I have a Pekarian attitude: it's spread and thereby there's a cigarette paper between the everyday and itself.
Enough space to - what? Laugh at it? Cry at it? To step out of the frame, as the actor who plays him does in the film. Out of the frame and ... isn't that enough? That's what a breather allows you. It's what an ally allows. And that makes me want to shout out: where have all the allies gone?