My First Week

I don't know last time I washed clothes. But I can tell you, in 1898, Hopatcong was named Town of Brooklyn.

Not sure how many empty energy drink cans are piled in my car, either — ran out of toes to count. But I know three framed photos line Mayor Sylvia Petillo's desk.

Such is life as Hopatcong Patch's editor. Hygiene and sleep give way to minutiae and meetings. Councilmen and Dunkin Donuts cashiers — medium iced coffee, French vanilla flavoring, sugar, skim milk — push your personal life to the backseat.

And, really, I'm OK with it.

This experience has been more than interesting. It's been enlightening. Frenzied, sure, but definitely enlightening — and our site's only been live for a week.

See, you grow up somewhere and think you know it.

Then you talk to the town council and realize there's more to this place than Frank's Pizzeria and Jefferson Field.

You attend its public schools, somehow graduate and figure all the while the teachers and administrators had everything under control.

Then you sit and listen to a Board of Education discussion — one of maybe five people in the crowd, scribbling in a notebook, holding a voice recorder into the next row of seats — and understand they're like the rest of us, trying like heck to keep it together.

I'm not the only one thinking this way. Earlier this week, Board of Health member Thomas Forbes agreed with me.

Forbes has lived in Hopatcong for more than a decade. Before moving here, he worked in Manhattan and for a long time lived in what he called "the greater New York area."

Forbes doesn't consider himself a politician, no way. He's a regular guy, a website consultant. But he's been interested in Hopatcong government for a while, and has played a small part in it throughout the years, helping out where he can.

He told me most people don't know what's going on in Hopatcong.

"I can't remember a community more devoid of a media presence," he said.

Others I've talked to concurred. Hopatcong's in a unique — and perhaps unenviable — situation, they say. Straddling the Morris-Sussex county lines means Hopatcong doesn't really belong to any larger community. Hopatcong isn't so much a Sussex County town — where are its farms? Nor is it a Morris County 'burb— where are its McMansions?

You can't even blame the Hopatcong Police Department for no longer issuing roundups of the week's criminal activity. Why spend the manpower if the local media stopped asking for reports a while ago?

So, Hopatcong has developed a sort of middle-child syndrome, thanks to the area's two daily newspapers, which swing around when the bad stuff happens and somehow run out of column space when the high school asks them to print things like its list of National Honors Society inductees.

You'll find important facts like that on Hopatcong Patch. And, eventually, you'll either meet one of our reporters or myself, and you'll be able to tell us what concerns you about the town. Then we'll follow up on it.

Because Hopatcong's not just our No. 1 priority — it's our only priority. So nothing's too small for at least a little coverage. And no story's so big that we can't find a way that it affects Hopatcong.

And with that, I'm going to do laundry.

Or not.