Is This For Real?

I woke up to rain this morning, which is an incredibly rare circumstance in Pleasantville. I love the rain, the renewal, the smell, the greenery that follows. When my alarm went off, I quickly silenced it and made the decision to lay in bed in a time I call "unprotected sleep." As my brain began to recognize the sound of rain outside my first thought was, "Oh, that sounds like a rain stick!"

My imagination quickly jumps to a boy with his eyes closed and a blissful smile on his face, a sunny day out the window in the background while flipping a rain stick and listening intently to the 15 second soundbite of a cloudier place.

Rain sticks were pretty sought after when I was in high school. I lived in Las Vegas, where rain is even more sparse than it is here. The idea that you could capture a different place and a blissful sound in a stick (aren't all the best things on sticks?) was unbelievable to our teenage minds.

Today you can capture the same faux climate in an iPhone app, alongside the Koi Pond and the Zen Garden, creating a sense of 90s bliss in a modern day MIDI application. Next time I hear rain I hope that my brain is not conditioned to think everything is fake, but that rain, and fish, and...rocks, are real. The only sound effect application that is worthy is the fart machine...the funny sound without the pungent partner.