From meme to friend

Ben Gipson
2 min readApr 17, 2013

It was my first year of college. As many of you have experienced, you meet a lot of people in college whether on purpose or accident. Some of them you become instant best friends with and others you really dislike. Well this is the story of one friend in particular who is one of my best friends I made.

I met many of the older students at UAFS (University of Arkansas-Fort Smith). They were particularly friendly and welcomed me into their groups to hang out and get to know them. One day, my friend Alec and I went back to his apartment on campus to get some equipment for a movie we were making. Taking a look around his apartment, I ran into one of his suite mates named Charles French. We introduced ourselves and then Alec came in and started cracking inside jokes with him, and so I summed up that he was a pretty cool guy. To describe Charles, he is a hefty guy (but is actively in the process of doing insanity and is slimming down quite remarkably) with a deep voice and one of the funniest guys I know. There were times I had seen him at church but just never really introduced myself to him. From that day though, we became good friends.

Monday, I was up at work when Alec and my friend/co-worker Weston were talking about how Charles was famous, probably one of the most famous unknown persons in Fort Smith. You are thinking, how was he famous but yet unknown? Well, here’s the thing. Alec started telling me about how Charles was a meme and one of the most famous memes that has been created. So he showed me a picture of the “******* Don’t Know My Popsicle” meme and there he was, Mr. Charles French. I was surprised but immediately burst into laughter because here he was, a meme I had seen plenty before and now I know the guy on it. It is such a well known meme that even College Humor used it in one of their videos. And oddly enough, it fits his personality pretty well.

I can now say that I know a famous person or meme to be exact and I am not sure if I can ever look at Charles the same because of it. But then again, I remind myself that the Charles I know actually reflects the persona of the meme and that is the real deal. Oh, and the shirt he is wearing in the picture…yeah, he still owns that shirt.

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Ben Gipson

Disciple of Christ, Youth Ministry Intern, college student, music enthusiast, and lover of people...