The Nashville Zoo

It’s not often that Vicki and I get to sever the hold the inter-matrix has over us; but when we do, we like to try to get out in nature a bit.  We decided that screaming children and being run over by strollers would be cool; if only we could couple that with a nice sensory experience like animal poo wafting on the cool morning air.  So where to go, where to go..?

Chuck E. Cheese wasn’t open that early; so that was out.  Too bad, it really had all the correct criteria we desired.

It was about sixty degrees in Music City.  The sun was shining.  We’ve recently had an inordinate amount of snow for Nashville and we were feeling a tad cooped up.  The zoo seemed the only logical choice and was far less dangerous than places where kids can be kids; so we fired up the Tiny Lion mobile and flossed our pimpin’ asses over to the zizzle.  And what a beautiful day for flossin’, let me tell you!  (We were also lucky enough to have a couple of free passes to the zoo, courtesy of David from The Lane Motor Museum–Thanks David!)

We arrived not too long after the zoo opened and therefore, the screaming kids were still churching it up.  Heathens that Vicki and I are, we had already completed our ritual sacrifice of oatmeal and protein bars in honor of Cthulhu–we’ll dance naked under the full moon next weekend.  We pretty much had the park to ourselves.  I mean, there’s ALWAYS gonna be some tiny human larvae running around unsupervised at a place like a zoo; but that’s why we carry pepper spray and a good whacking stick.

We, amazingly enough, only had to mace a couple of kids before word spread that the Tiny Lion O-G’s were up in that piece and the rest of the little thugs showed respect.  (A couple threw up some gang signs; but they know how Vicki rolls… Thug life, bitches.)

Ridin’ dirty with my wife aside, we were pretty stoked to just be outside and getting to see some animals.  The Nashville Zoo is really a pretty nice little zoo.  It’s wooded in a lot of parts; so you’re not under the glaring sun in the summer and this also adds to a very peaceful overall experience.

One of our particular moments of enjoyment about walking around this zoo is that it has a beautiful bamboo forest.  The bamboo is huge and they have this really calming music playing quietly in the background.  When you’re always working on this business of music (and if you got any more pale you’d sparkle like a damn teeny bopper vampire); it is an amazing feeling to just get out of the house, ya know?  We really were loving us some zoo walking.

One of the first animal enclosures you come across in the Nashville zoo is the gibbon play ground/rope course.  Gibbons are these incredible acrobatic little apes with long arms and lovely singing voices.  Since it was still relatively early, they hadn’t begun sound check just yet and were pretty much just chilling and having some salad.  They were fairly mobile and moved around a bit; but nothing like what they’d begin to do later.

Now if you’ve never heard a gibbon start working the mic like a boss; well, you’ve simply never heard real music!  These little dudes have some pipes.  They could front any metal band you’ve ever heard without a damn mic.  They make the “loud guy” in the bar look like he’s whispering sweet drunken nothing’s in your ear.  747′s ain’t got shit on these bad boys.

They’re loud is the general idea I am trying to convey.

They’re also supreme daredevils when it comes to swinging through the trees.  It’s pretty awesome.  They’ll swing in some impossible angle, only to catch another branch with their feet and swing off in another direction.  Bear in mind, this is all twenty to forty feet off the ground.  You get a tad dizzy watching them.  I silently vowed to one day create a potion that would give me gibbon like dexterity and singing prowess.  But there is simply no time right now… Get on it, scientists!

Next we found a building proclaiming to have the secret life of the Americas or something like that–maybe it was the undiscovered life of Americas or… I don’t know.  I can’t recall.  I remember finding the name slightly strange and worried that we were going to see business men in leather submission thongs and senators drunker than Snooki; but relaxed when I remembered that we were in a different kind of zoo.  I was right to remain calm.  This particular building had far more to do with awesome snakes, frogs, turtles, fish and bugs than dirty old men putting things into other things.

The Nash zoo really does have a pretty impressive array of reptile, amphibian and creepy crawly things.  The colors on some of these animals are absolutely incredible.  I wouldn’t recommend any licking of any of these particular toads–as many are insanely poisonous; but feel free to lick the glass.  I asked a keeper if they minded and they said they hire kids to do that very thing for them.  I am proud to report that the snozberries taste like snozberries!

What else did we see?  Meerkats, a wide array of cranes, storks and other birds, a rad lynx, giraffes (I got photobombed by a giraffe which you have already seen at the top of this article), African elephants, lemurs, zebras, some type of red haired little piggy, tapirs, leopards, cougars and my personal favorites, a couple of insanely, bitching-cool, gangsta tigers!

We had seen the tigers before; but damn… It never gets old.  They were up and about and pretty much bragging to the world about how awesome they are.  We agreed with them; so they let us hang out for a little while.  I asked them what it was like to be the resident badass in their particular hood.  They laughed at me and told me they’d love to show me; all I had to do was hop the fence and they’d let me know how to work it like a boss.

Seemed reasonable to me.

Vicki didn’t let me go, though.  She said we had to get going.  She wanted a giraffe to photobomb me and we just didn’t have the time for me to learn “a painful life lesson.”  I didn’t know what she meant; but she very firmly told me that we had to get going.  I didn’t want to press my luck cause I knew she was serious, just by the way she was cocking her pistol.  (She only does that when shits about to get real)

We quickly made our way over to the giraffe field.  Now apparently, the Nashville zoo’s giraffes are getting busy, because a new baby giraffe was just born in November of 2010.  We didn’t see the little guy; but the big one came over and we were frantically trying to take our picture with the giraffe over our shoulder.  (You know how you take a pic of yourself with your friend/partner and you hold the camera out as far away as you can to get you both in the picture?  Now try to do that while getting a 17 foot tall giraffe in frame)  We’d snap a shot, hurry to look at the viewer, giggle like loons and try it again.  People were looking at us like we’d lost it, slightly.  Vicki fired a couple of warning shots at people giving us nasty looks and they left us alone after that.

Eventually, we kind of gave up trying to get both of us in the pic; the giraffe kept telling us it had shit to do and to hurry up and get the pic.  I got a pic of the giraffe photobombing Vicki and she got one of me.  You’ll never see the one of Vicki.  She maintains that in order for her to represent and keep her street cred, she can’t smile in pictures (or at least let YOU know she smiles in pictures).  I asked her if I should worry about my street cred and she told me her bitch didn’t need it; she’d rep for both of us.

She treat me so fine.

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