I cannot imagine hanging out with people I went to secondary school with. I kept up with all those guys from 18 to about 24 when I drifted away. AFAIK, they all still hang out doing the exact same boring shit i.e. working shitty jobs to get money to allow them to get plastered and smoke bongs all day. I've got one dude that I still see and it wouldn't phase me if I didn't see him again.
I am still really close with a few of my high school friends, drifted apart from some others. I always had a really close core group of friends, and everyone else was kind of an asshole, or indifferent to me. I was considered a weird nerd so most people weren't my friends. My oldest friend I met in second grade and we immediately started hanging out all the time... his parents are like secondary parent to me to this day. We're still like brothers, we both went through a lot of drugs problems too. He got really mad at me for a while when I moved across the country, but that was a long time ago. He lives a long way away from me and is a professional musician so I don't get to see him often, the last time I saw him was this Christmas. He got off heroin a few years ago, I thought he was going to end up dead for a while, and I thought he was doing well. He is doing better than before, but he's gotten into the meth. I smoked it with him once, had a blast, it was the first night I saw him, we stayed up all night and talked the whole time about what has been going on in our lives. He was telling me he doesn't do it all the time but he was doing it every time I saw him that week, even before he came over to see my parents, and he has the meth face... his teeth are getting fucked up and he looks 10 years older. He lost a ton of weight and he was pumping me up about that when I saw him but I see why now. Freaks me out, I hope he doesn't go off the rails. My other really close friend from those days I met in 7th grade, and he has been suffering from major depressive disorder since he was 15. He tells me he wishes he could kill himself almost every day. I am always afraid I'm going to find out he did it one day.
I've never been to a high school reunion. My 15 year reunion passed last year (what the fuck). Part of me wants to go to one, because I am so much different. My level of self-confidence is far greater and I don't look like an awkward, gangly teenager anymore.

I'm not willing to travel 700 miles to go though, and I'm never around when they have those things. Plus it would probably be a little weird. When I got Facebook I got all these friend requests from people I went to high school with, and I checked out their profiles. A lot of them had kids and that was like... shit, 10 or 11 years ago. Now I look at them and most of them look SO much older than me, they have broods of children, my high school girlfriend has a 12 year old. In their pictures they look so worn down, it's like, my life is more exciting now than it was even in college, and they're sitting around talking about the good old days of high school living in the same town with the same people. I think it would trip me out to go to a high school reunion. To me high school is a blip now, it didn't even feel like the real world.
Sounds like a good woman.

We all need one to temper our innate masculine drive to self destruct.
Indeed... it definitely helps me. Both of my adult relationships have been with women who aren't nearly as into drugs as me... unfortunately with my last one I hid my drug use from her, but my girlfriend now I don't hide anything from, she just only rarely wants to do drugs (even weed, she has some weeks where she'll smoke in the evenings with me but most of the time she doesn't). When I'm hanging out with her, I just want to be connected to her so I usually don't do any drugs, and it's cool because it gives me 3 or 4 days of the week where I'm being sober, or maybe a hit of weed.
IMO, pregabalin is an underrated gem for music-enhancement.
Phenibut, which is closely related, is one of my absolute favorite drugs for making music. It's indescribable the effect it has, it's like I can just get so much more into it, and I feel so inspired.