Walking through the streets of Damascus' old city with my backpack on looking for an internet café. I just arrived. Hitchiking in at sunset from the desert outside Palmyra, truck taking me to the empty highway junction sand and scrub, wind blowing. Two men wait by the curve of the road, stand up expectantly as I approach, I greet them and move on, around and down with the highway as it plunges to the southwest. After some time a speeding van spots me hailing, slows to a red brake light stop that takes 300 meters, I get in and in four hours of watching them hurtle through the darkness we pass the junction to Iraq, take the Damascus road and I come to the lights twinkling on every hillside, a city ancient at the time of Jesus, Umayyad capitol, Al Shams, city of Hussein and John the Baptist's heads: the Syrian capitol of Damascus. A taxi takes me from there to Bab Tuma (St. Thomas Gate) of 'Damascus Medina Al Kadim' (Damascus the old city).

A man sees me asking about internet on the small street, blue light coming from nowhere, ground shiney with rain, cold mist and the sound of people's soles loud and slapping the flagstones. "I can show you where is internet" he says. He is more than two meters tall, a bodybuilder, Christian (this is the Christian Quarter), "this way" he continues and we walk.

Somehow the conversation takes turns past my nationality and in his limited English he says "we have a Fight Club here, have you seen the movie?" "No," I replied.

"...So you beat each other up?" I ask, "Is this full contact sparring?" He pauses "no, we just pretend," and adds "it's just for fun."

Now, months later, here in my childhood home in Evanston, Illinois, USA, I rented this movie and watched it with my parents, both in their late 50s. "I want to understand this movie that seems to have made such an impact on people" just like I watched Pulp Fiction for the first time a week ago.

They found it disturbing, I found it fascinating. Of course, the end, with the towers in what looked like NY coming down seemed prophetic of actual events (but since the method was trucks with explosives it seems actually to refer back to the earlier attempt on the WTC) . This is not Islam though, the movie's message seemed to say this was a war against materialism and spiritual poverty. Unibomber meets the WTC attempt meets men's support groups meets the WTO Seattle anarchists.

The important part for me is: like the movie or not it struck a chord for a lot of people and not just inside America, not just inside the G8 countries. If this movie was part of the inspiration for the ones who perpetrated September 11 they seemed to have missed out on the part of the movie that said that the buildings were empty of people at the time of detonation (night).

In the movie the plan was to eliminate credit card debt and set us free by blowing up all of the credit card headquarters, destroying the outward signs of modern civilization: small figures wearing buckskin hunting deer and pounding corn in the shadow of the ruins of the Sears Tower.

The main character was an Ad Absurdum argument, his whole life bought out of the Ikea catalog, corporate traveller working in a white collar world of single serving relationships, emotionally dead, attending other people's pain at support groups so that he could have catharsis and sleep.

For me the fact that this struck people as a cool set of concepts or a "freaky movie" or they relate to the societal spiritual problem presented (in all cases) describes symptoms of something.

Do we feel dead emotionally as a society? Has alienation reached its apex with corporate culture programming us to be little comsumers doing the right thing, overextended, mortgages, loans, debt at 18%, until that merges in an unbroken blur with debt accrued on our own children's behalf, deferral of living our own lives until we are too old to climb a tree or swim a river: that kitchenette trailer and Golden Eagle Pass just waiting at the end of the rainbow, our jubulant dreams momentary red flares lighting up the air before we pass into the gloomy isolation of perpetual care and monthly visits?

Or is the buzz around this movie just people who see a "Fight Club" as a cool underground way to feel like men, imitating without drawing blood?

Back in Damascus at my guide's favorite internet place, it is 9 PM and packed on both levels with young men screaming and playing the ultra-violent realistic combat game "Counterstrike" against each other (where the bad guys -each other- are called "terrorists").

Big yawn as I sit down amidst excited screams & yells to check my email for the first time in a week: it has been this way in every internet café between here and Nepal.