Thirty years, you can collect a lot of stuff. The twenty-two years before that he just lost stuff, I guess.

Stacks and stacks of printed matter. Manuscripts.

Tom Waits’ voice says, “A lock of his daughter’s hair in an envelope,” like a line from “What’s he building in there?”

“A giant beetle preserved in a glass box.”

Love letters from his girls when they were little.

A two foot stack of journals in which half the entries say how tired he is, and the other half how depressed he is.

Pictures, in which he looks depressed or tired or apologetic for living.

“Wow,” he says again, realizing what a drag that must have been for those around him.

All those years.

Was it worth it?

Fighting his way out of that tar pit by himself?

Was it worth it? wonders the clinologist.

He made it out. Now here he is.

All covered in tar. Getting tar all over everything as he tries to tidy up the room, to decide what to throw away and what to keep.

How could he not have noticed all that tar before?