Vancouver’s annual fireworks celebrations are the city in microcosm. There are corporate sponsors, occasional stabbings, police wasting perfectly good liquor, no parking, bridge and tunnel hordes, a Cactus Club, marijuana clouds, and carefully manufactured excitements that are remote and untouchable on a barge way out in the ocean. Wouldn’t it be nice to let loose and do like Mexico do? Every year at the National Pyrotechnical Festival in Tultepec (photos via Thomas Prior), over 100,000 people gather to watch and participate in the spectacle. Sure there might be an injury or two, but these must be offset by the noise, fun, tequila, and the unique satisfaction that comes when you aren’t treated like a plodding infant by the State.