Tonight, the moon is going to bleed.
I don’t mean that metaphorically. At approximately 3:00 a.m. Eastern, the full Worm Moon will slide into Earth’s shadow and turn the color of a gas station hot dog. Astronomers call this a total lunar eclipse. The Old Farmer’s Almanac calls it the Blood Moon. Combined, you get the Blood Worm Moon, which sounds less like an astronomical event and more like something H.P. Lovecraft would mutter into a pillow after eating too much cheese.
The Worm Moon gets its name because March is when earthworms start writhing back to the surface after winter. So the moon that governs the return of squirming, soil-dwelling invertebrates is also going to hemorrhage across the sky tonight while the rest of the world stares at its phones. If the universe is not actively trying to warn us, it is at minimum being very passive-aggressive.
I Am Not Qualified to Interpret Celestial Omens, but Here We Go
I live on a farm outside Charlottesville with a pig named Trouble McFussbucket, a chihuahua named Senor Hector “Queso” Suarez DDS, and a wife who is getting a PhD in Education, which means she is paying a university a tremendous amount of money to learn things at the exact moment in history when a tech startup has built a robot that will learn things for you while you sleep. The irony is not lost on either of us. It is, in fact, slowly killing us.
But when the moon turns red on the same day you learn that a Silicon Valley dropout built an AI that attends college for you and compared human beings to horses when asked if this was a problem, and an actor from Better Call Saul is delivering Amazon packages and posting about it on Reddit with more dignity than most Fortune 500 CEOs display on a good Tuesday, you have to entertain the possibility that the Blood Worm Moon is not just a celestial event. It is a performance review. And we are failing.
Einstein Would Like You to Know He Is Available for Homework
In late February, a company called Companion launched an AI tool called Einstein. Not “like Einstein.” Not “in the spirit of Einstein.” They used his actual name and likeness, without permission, which is a bold move for a product whose entire purpose is helping people take credit for work they didn’t do. I have some experience with AI confidently getting things wrong, but this was a new frontier.
Here is what Einstein AI did. You handed it your university login credentials. It logged into Canvas. It watched your lectures,read your essays, participated in your online discussions. Then, it wrote your papers, with citations and submitted your homework. Automatically. While you slept.
The company’s FAQ page included the question, “What if I want to do an assignment myself?” That is the saddest question in the history of educational technology. That question belongs in a museum next to a small placard that reads, “Here is where we gave up.”
Horses, Apparently, Are the Key to Understanding All of This
The founder, a Brown dropout named Advait Paliwal, defended his creation in an interview with 404 Media by comparing humans to horses. He said that horses used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, horses became “a lot more free.” He said it would be weird if horses revolted and said, “No, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.”
Horses did not attend four years of carriage-pulling school. Horses did not take on $120,000 in carriage-pulling debt. And when the automobile arrived, horses did not become “more free.” Horses became glue. They became dog food. They became the sad, beautiful animals you see standing in fields staring at the horizon like philosophy majors at a career fair. Maybe the analogy is perfect. Maybe he’s saying we’re all going to become glue.
And here is the part where the universe reveals that it has a sense of humor and it is mean. Einstein AI was not shut down because it was an academic fraud engine. It was not shut down because professors revolted. It was shut down because of trademark infringement. CMG Worldwide, which manages Einstein’s licensing rights, sent a cease-and-desist. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem called the use of his name “profoundly inconsistent with his legacy.” The website went dark on February 26th. Not because of ethics. Because a dead man’s brand deal was more legally enforceable than the entire concept of education.
The robot built to steal learning was destroyed by stolen intellectual property. The snake ate its own tail, and the tail was copyrighted. If you want to talk about applied ethics from a guy who lives with a pig, this is the trolley problem where both tracks lead to the same ditch.
Meanwhile, in an Amazon Van with No Shocks
If Einstein AI is the supply side of our collective agreement to stop trying, the story of John Christian Love is the demand side, and it hits like stepping on a Lego in the dark, except the Lego is the entire American Dream and you’re barefoot and nobody is coming.
Love is 35. He played Ernesto, known as Ernie, on Better Call Saul, the Emmy-nominated prequel to Breaking Bad that is widely considered one of the finest dramas in television history. He appeared in 11 episodes, playing the loyal, decent friend of Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill in a show that was fundamentally about what happens when decent people get ground up by systems that don’t care about decency. Also, he was on Friday Night Lights. He was in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot with Tina Fey. He had a career. There are credits.
In late February, Love posted in a Reddit forum for Amazon delivery drivers. He shared a photo of himself in the van, another delivering a package, and a printout of one of his scenes from the show. He wrote: “Hey it’s me John Christian Love. Just want yall to know that as the actor who brought you the character of ‘Ernesto/Ernie’ in Better Call Saul, that I too am out here delivering with you! It sucks. But 1 delivery at a time. Be blessed out there!”
“It sucks. But 1 delivery at a time. Be blessed out there” is the most accidentally profound sentence anyone has written in 2026 and it was posted in a subreddit for people whose vans smell like cardboard and existential dread.
Love said he hadn’t quit acting. Work was just slow. Better Call Saul wasn’t the break he thought it would be. He’d worked on a film with Lily Gladstone and Bryan Cranston that ran out of money and never paid him. He said he’d been a mail carrier, a FedEx driver, a UPS seasonal driver, and all of them were better than Amazon because at Amazon the routes change daily, the vans are garbage, and the turnover is relentless.
A man who acted opposite Bob Odenkirk on a show about the American legal system’s ability to devour good people is now being devoured by the American logistics system, and his response is to encourage strangers. That is a level of grace most people cannot access under ideal conditions, let alone while delivering forty-seven packages to houses where the residents are asleep because a robot did their homework for them.
What the Blood Worm Moon Is Trying to Tell Us Tonight
Here is what I think the moon is saying tonight, hanging there like a bruise over Virginia while my pig sleeps and my chihuahua vibrates with unknowable anxiety on the couch.
We built a machine to go to college for us. The man who built it thinks we are horses. The machine was not destroyed by conscience but by a licensing agreement. And while all of this was happening, a working actor from a show about the slow moral corruption of a decent man was delivering packages for a company founded by the richest person alive, posting on Reddit that “it sucks” but also “be blessed,” which is the kind of sentence that makes you want to grab the entire country by the shoulders and shake it until something falls out.
The worms are coming back to the surface. That is what March means. The ground thaws, and the worms do what worms do, which is churn through dead and decaying matter and turn it into something the soil can use. They are not pretty. No one has ever posted a worm on Instagram with the caption “living my best life.” But without them, literally nothing grows.
John Christian Love, blessing strangers from the front seat of a deteriorating Amazon van, is a worm in the most sacred sense of the word. He is not a horse that got set free. He is a human being who made art and is now making do, and his willingness to say “it sucks” and “be blessed” in the same breath is the most alive thing I’ve encountered in a year that has been, let’s say, aggressive.
Go outside tonight. Look up. The sky is bleeding and the worms are awake and one of them used to be on TV, and he wants you to know: it sucks, but be blessed out there.
See my Amazon author page.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos. He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- When God Closes a Door, He Needs to Go Get Some Paprika - March 5, 2026
- Monkey Testicles, Missing Documents, and the Eternal Quest to Stay on Top - March 3, 2026
- Under the Blood Worm Moon, Nobody Has to Learn Anything - March 3, 2026
