Eighty-Seven and She Still Runs People Over

Picture being 87 years old and opening a gas bill that makes your blood pressure spike into dangerous territory. The reasonable response—calling the utility company, writing a strongly worded letter—isn’t happening. So you pick up a controller and load Grand Theft Auto V.

That’s exactly what one delightfully furious grandmother did, and the footage is something to behold. She doesn’t meander around Los Santos taking in the scenery. She mows down pedestrians with the focused efficiency of someone who has genuinely had enough. No guilt, no second-guessing. Just carnage and what looks, honestly, like relief.

Games get talked about as escapism, but this is something sharper. It’s closer to catharsis—the old Aristotelian kind, where you let yourself feel the thing you’re not supposed to feel and come out the other side lighter. She’s not pretending to be a criminal. She’s briefly becoming someone who can do what the situation emotionally demands. I’ve had weeks where I understood that impulse completely.

I would not want to run into her in a dark alley. Or anywhere near a utility company’s head office.