There is a thing that happens right before something becomes real and I have been chasing that thing my entire life and I don't expect to stop and I don't want to stop and I'm not sure I could if I tried because I don't think it's a choice exactly, I think it's more like a condition, like being left-handed, like the specific way certain people cannot sleep past five in the morning no matter what, it's just what's true about you and the sooner you accept it the sooner you can get to work.

I was making things before I had any business making them. I was sending letters to people, to companies, to people I admired, to institutions, I was nine years old and I had thoughts that needed to go somewhere and I put them in envelopes and sent them to addresses I found in magazines and I did not wait to find out if anyone wrote back because the waiting was not the point, the sending was the point, and that has never changed, the sending has always been the point.

I grew up in a place where you know immediately what's real and what isn't. Where the gap between those two things is not subtle. Where the weather is not subtle and the people are not subtle and you develop a sensitivity to anything false that becomes permanent, that installs itself in your body at a cellular level, and you carry it everywhere after that, into every room and every project and every conversation, this instrument that is always running, always taking readings, always asking whether the thing in front of you is real or whether it is performing realness, and those are not the same thing, they are never the same thing, and once you know the difference you cannot unknow it.

I care about honesty the way some people care about religion. I don't mean that in a self-congratulatory way, I mean it in the way where it's just the organizing principle, the thing everything else arranges itself around, the thing I come back to when I'm lost, and I have been lost a lot, and the answer is always the same, the answer is always go back to what's true.

The thing that's true is almost never the thing on the surface. The surface is just the address. The actual thing lives underneath and it is quieter and stranger and more specific and more universal at the same time and finding it is the whole job, everything else is just getting yourself to the place where you can find it, which takes a long time and costs a lot and is worth everything.

I became an art director because I needed somewhere to be while I figured out what I actually was. I kept leaving to go watch the editors work because the editing was where the meaning lived, where two things put next to each other became a third thing that neither of them was alone, and that alchemy was the closest thing I had found to the thing I was looking for and I couldn't stay away from it, I kept crossing the street until they gave me a chair and that chair was the beginning of everything.

I came back to the midwest and made commercials and films and projects that took years and projects that took hours and I treated all of them the same way, with the same instrument running, the same question always, is this real, does this land somewhere true, will the person watching feel something they recognize from their own interior, from the part of themselves they don't usually have language for. That's what I was always trying to give people. Not an emotion but a recognition. The feeling of being seen by something that couldn't possibly know you.

I've rewritten things fifty times. I've stayed up until four in the morning on the fortieth draft of something that was almost right and not gone to sleep because almost right is another word for wrong and I can't sleep next to something that's wrong. There is a specific frequency that wrong gives off. It is very quiet and it is constant and it is intolerable if you are built a certain way and I am built that way.

There's a thing that happens when you commit to something completely. When you take your foot off and go. Not most of the way. Not with an exit. All the way, knowing what the landing might be, deciding that the going is worth whatever happens when you land. Most people don't do this. Most people, and I genuinely understand this, build in a door. A small private exit that lets them say it wasn't really what they meant if it doesn't work. I have never been able to do that. I go all the way in or I don't go and I have paid for this in ways that would seem insane if I listed them and I am going to list them.

My pelvis. Both ankles. My femur. My wrist. My collarbone. My hip. A skull fracture. A tailbone. Bones I did not know had individual names until a doctor was telling me that mine were broken. Surgeons knew me by name. Recoveries took longer than the preparations for the things that caused them. And after every single one, the same thing: get back up. Not as a philosophy but as a fact. As the only available next step. The alternative was not getting back up and I was not interested in that.

I attempted to jump a motorcycle over the fountains at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. I stood in front of those fountains and thought about the distance and the speed and I believed I could do it. I went off the ramp at full speed in front of thousands of people who were not entirely sure they were about to watch someone survive and I did not clear the fountain. I crashed and I was in a coma for 29 days and the footage went everywhere and when I woke up I thought about getting back on the motorcycle and that is exactly what I did.

Those 29 days are not the part of that story that matters. The part that matters is the going off the ramp. The decision to do the real thing instead of a version of it that was safer and smaller and survivable in ways that also made it not the actual thing. The crash was just the cost of having meant it. You don't stop doing the work because of what it costs. You keep a running tab and you go again.

In 1974 I attempted to cross the Snake River Canyon in Idaho on a steam-powered rocket called the Skycycle X-2. The parachute deployed too early. I drifted into the canyon instead of across it. I have thought about that jump for fifty years. Not with regret exactly but with the specific feeling of a thing that remains unresolved. A draft that was never finished. The wrong version of something that had a right version somewhere inside it that I never got to. Those are the ones that stay. The ones that almost worked. The ones where you can still feel the shape of what they were trying to be.

Wembley Stadium, 1975. Ninety thousand people. I cleared thirteen buses and crashed on the landing. I got up and took a microphone and told the crowd I was never jumping again and I meant it completely and I was jumping again in three months and I also meant that completely and I don't think those two things contradict each other. I think that's just what it looks like to be someone who does the real thing. The real thing doesn't care about your announcements.

I wore a white jumpsuit with stars and a cape and drove a van with an eagle on it because that was the truest costume I could find for what I was doing and what I was, and the crowd felt that because the crowd always feels that, because honesty is the only thing that works and it works every single time, it has never once failed to work, you give people something real and they know it before they can say why.

My name is Evel Knievel. I was born Robert Craig Knievel in Butte, Montana in 1938. Before I found the motorcycle I was a lot of things. A copper miner. A hockey player. A salesman. I tried a lot of containers before I found the right one and the right one turned out to be a ramp and a distance and a crowd and the silence that lives in the half second between leaving the ramp and knowing how it ends. That silence is the whole thing. That silence is the most honest place I have ever been. I would go back there every day if I could. I went back there every day for thirty years and it was never enough and it was always worth it.

I have spent my entire life doing something in midair in an attempt to hold one's attention long enough to matter. I think I got there a few times. In front of the right people. In a white suit. Going very fast. That's the whole story.