HOME | The Time Traveling Flaneur

There was a time before endless notifications, doom scrolling, and digital exhaustion.
A time of handwritten letters, jazz drifting through smoke-filled cafés, midnight conversations, film cameras, train stations, poetry, and possibility.

I am Efra Guerrero, a 54-year-old Flaneur who happens to be a writer/poet and photographer.

(A flaneur is a detached urban wanderer who observes and explores the city, seeking meaning and self-improvement through observation and opportunistic exploration.)

I created Enzo, my alter-ego, to go back in time, so to speak, to meet people I admire from the past. To have brief encounters with them and learn something.

One day, a peculiar man taught Enzo to time travel, it took him 5 years to master and now he uses it to go back in time once a month.

It works in a much simpler way than the movies would have you believe. There are no glowing machines, no screaming portals ripping through the sky. However, it takes years to master, but the process itself is strangely human. You breathe deeply and rapidly through your nose, almost like a controlled panic, while meditating intensely on the exact time and place you want to reach. After eight to ten minutes, if your mind and body lock into the right frequency, you slip away. Oh, and you must consume at least 20 mg of edible cannabis.

You arrive in another dimension that mirrors the moment you were seeking — the same streets, the same people, the same history — but not your original reality. I think the universe, or whatever created us, designed it this way to keep us from destroying our own timeline.

A cosmic safety mechanism perhaps, otherwise, humanity would’ve fucked everything up by now.

Haiku

Rain on Rue Delambre-
Two writers trading stories
Ashes filled the tray

I grew up in the era of cassette tapes, vinyl records, bookstores, and long walks without a phone in my hand. I’ve always been drawn to the spirit of the 1920s through the 1960s — the worlds of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Frida Kahlo, Picasso, Tarkovsky, jazz musicians, poets, drifters, and dreamers.

I often find myself wondering what it would have been like to sit beside them in a dimly lit café… to wander Paris in the rain… to share pipe tobacco and conversation with artists who still believed the world had soul...

...And that is why I created

The Time Traveling Flaneur — a monthly snail mail experience for romantics, creatives, old souls, and modern bohemians.

These are not stories about changing history or saving the world.
They are intimate, observational encounters — quiet moments across time.

In these letters, Enzo travels to different eras searching for something many of us feel we’ve lost:
humanity, mystery, beauty, conversation, presence.

The world today often feels sterile. Corporate. Disconnected.
The Time Traveling Flaneur is my rebellion against that.

It’s an invitation to slow down.
To hold something real in your hands again.
To disappear for a little while into another decade.

This is for the flâneurs, the artists, the wanderers, the nostalgic hearts, and those who still believe life should feel poetic.

If that sounds like you, I’d love to have you join me.

Each month, you’ll receive a physical letter in your mailbox, inside it will contain:

INSIDE