Bucket list

It’s okay to lower your standards in 2023

It’s New Year's Day, 2023 and I’m in Salt Lake City. For the past few days, a persistent storm has covered the city with a blanket of snow. It’s been over a decade since I lived in Utah, so this type of weather has re-earned its novelty. I sit by the window and gaze in awe at nature literally whiting out the past year. 

In terms of holidays, January 1st is a sleeper hit for me. From October to December, we’re inundated with the histrionic pageantry of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas/NYE. The final months of the year have absolutely no chill, but then New Year's Day comes and people cool down. They stop posting unpleasantly earnest social media posts. They stop bragging about their pop culture consumption. 

Yes, time is a construct/flat circle/whatever, but for me, the symbolism of New Year’s Day feels good. I like having an excuse to evaluate the past, assess the present, and set goals for the future. 

I don’t have any resolutions this year. 2022 was monumental for me. I finished grad school, got a teaching credential, and then a teaching job. It sounds pretty straightforward typing it out, but the amount of work I put into all that is more work than I’ve done in the past decade. It would’ve been totally on-point for me to give up at any step in the process. But here I am—new career, new life path, benefits, a pension. My life is vastly different now than it was at the beginning of 2022. 

This year, I’m taking it easy. I mean, it’d be nice to drop out of the 200 Club, but if I remain a husky boi for the rest of 2023, then so be it. 

Really, the only thing I want to accomplish—apart from surviving my first year of teaching—is eating a bucket of spaghetti from By The Bucket. And tonight, the first night of the new year, I’m going to get my chance. 

Regular readers know that I don’t have the most sophisticated culinary palate, but even the promise of “hot spaghetti to go” gave me pause when I first heard of the Arizona-based fast food chain. It hit some deep-seated attraction/repulsion instinct in me, something downright Freudian. On one hand, there’s nothing appealing about the equation “hot” + “bucket” = “food”. On the other hand, I’m a man who appreciates it when food dares you to eat it. It’s like restaurants that relish in their own disgustingness by offering dishes like “the slop bucket” or “the pile” or whatever. 

And logistically, why had it taken so long for someone to make a fast-food spaghetteria? Why we’re spending $15-$20 per plate of noodles at even the lowest-rent Italian restaurant is one of life’s great mysteries.  

As New Year's Day becomes New Year's Night, the snow storm hasn’t let up. No one in my family is interested in coming up with dinner plans, so I suggest “By The Bucket.” Only me and my 11-year-old nephew are into this idea, but everyone else is too holiday’d out to think of anything better. The fact that By The Bucket is even open on New Year’s Day seems like a Hallmark movie miracle, but that’s an observation I keep to myself. 

My mom and I venture out in the storm to pick up the bucks o’ spag. There’s a solid six-inches of snow in By The Bucket’s parking lot, and there’s a car spinning out when we arrive. Fearful that it’ll slide into us, we stay in our car as the other slowly slips toward exit. I imagine dying in the By The Bucket parking lot on New Year's Day after being run over by a car unequipped for weather (a frame-worthy obituary). I see the driver’s face as the car passes: a woman, smiling, her windows already fogging up with spaghetti steam. That will be me soon, I think.

The interior of By The Bucket is like if a college kid opened a restaurant. There’s a bench, a Coca Cola-branded fridge, and for some reason, a selfie wall with a neon sign that reads “This must be the place.” I don’t know if it’s a Talking Heads reference or a misattributed quote by Brigham Young, who allegedly said “This is the place” when the Mormons arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. The only things missing are a bean bag chair and a poster of Bob Dylan. 

The “kitchen” is just five counter-top pasta cookers, or “rethermalizers”, that look like this:

There are only two employees working—two young women whose enthusiasm matches the stark decor. Not that I blame them—slinging spaghetti buckets on New Year’s Day is no one’s idea of a good time. 

Taking it all in, I realize By The Bucket may be the future of restaurants: minimal equipment, minimal employees, food that requires little-to-know culinary expertise, sparse decor. If there wasn’t signage affixed to the building, By The Bucket could very well just be a pop-up, a fly-by-night spaghetti operation. 

My mom and I each buy a family bucket meal, which supposedly feeds four people. The buckets aren’t branded by the way—it’s like By The Bucket got second-hand popcorn buckets from  defunct movie theaters. The family meal comes with a half-loaf of garlic bread, which I upgrade to a full loaf because, hey...special occasion. My sister-in-law had also requested meatballs, and lord knows how they cook those, but I order them anyway. 

We get our food quickly, and I have to admit it smells fucking good. But this is coming from me, a guy who salivates at the mere scent of a $5 Hot N Ready. 

We take the bounty back to my brother’s house. The dinner table is set and everyone stares reverently at the buckets placed before them. This must be what it was like when Jesus brought buckets o’ fish and bread to the starving masses. 

After a brief photo sesh with the buckets (mostly a proof of life thing in case the food kills me), I lift the foil off of the top of the buckets and a decadent plume rises to my nostrils. For a moment, I close my eyes and imagine all the people required to make this meal possible: the agricultural workers, the dairy farmers, the machinists, the transporters, the entrepreneurs, the retail workers. A synthesis of humanity. 

And then I open my eyes and look down. 

Mmm. 

We dish up. The dining room becomes quiet except for the sounds of forks against plates and heavy slurping. My 11-year-old nephew declares it’s “not bad!” and I agree. I’ve spent more money on grosser things in my life. Someone at the table describes the noodles “al dente” which is accurate but still seems too dignified. Even with seven of us, we don’t get to the bottom of the first bucket. It’s so much food. Overall, we’re vaguely satisfied with the food and lowkey happy that it didn’t kill us. Two and a half stars. Nay, three. 

This is all to say that sometimes your resolutions don’t have to be profound. At this point, simply existing seems as good of a goal as any. Who cares if you don’t lose that weight, or read that many books, or finish writing that novel. There’s always next year. Maybe this is the year that you settle for your own figurative bucket of spaghetti. It might not be great, but there’s nothing wrong with good enough. 

Happy 2023! 

(Also, waiting 2+ weeks to do my Happy New Year post is exactly the kind of energy I want to maintain in 2023)

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Julia Dixon Evans edited this post. Thanks, Julia. Go follow her on Instagram.