Can't mold together and extend a mesh without clipping

So, in the picture here I’m trying to join the two ends of the cylinder together then extend them out to make the rest of the side piece of this wand. I’ve tried to use a boolean modifier with a separate cylinder then joining faces, and I’ve tried bridging the ends of the cylinders then sculpting out the rest of it, but both times resulted in a bunch of jumbled vertices and smoothing it makes it worse. Is there any way I can join everything cleaner?

Here’s an outline of my desired result, the filled in area is where i’d like it to connect, then the outlined area is where I had planned to sculpt everything into place. I am still fairly new at sculpting so I could be messing something up.

Instead of sculpting, use a curve and bevel it, this will result in clean topology. With ALT+S you can set the radius of the pipe at any selected curve control points.

Documentation:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Bevelling_a_Curve