The hell is with these suggestions.

These lyrics are about hopelessness.

Every time you try hard and it looks like you’re accomplishing something, you’re making zero progress. You think you’re walking to where you want to go, moving forward, but the ground moves beneath you and you don’t progress and inch, etc.

Genius annotators try to actually understand incredibly simple metaphors challenge. Impossible mode (very hard).

“Everytime you think you’re looking, you’re just looking down”
Perhaps the narrator isn’t Cowboy Dan but is someone harshly judging people like Cowboy Dan who are so irritating and problematic. Perhaps the narrator realizes in a point of introspection that there’s more to life that parsing out who is bad or good and judging them based on their worst qualities.

These lines are all about perspective.

When someone walks, from their own perspective, they are not moving at all. Rather, the ground is moving beneath them. You cannot separate yourself from your own body, and everything you experience is from your own perspective. Brock is telling the listener to be aware of this.

Describing the act of talking as “just moving your mouth” minimizes the action to something mechanical and insignificant. We often see ourselves as important beings who do important things, but with a simple change of perspective, everything we do is just moving muscles. This line is meant to be humbling.

“Every time you think you’re looking, you’re just looking down” is about focusing too heavily on negative things. A pessimistic person may think that their perception of reality is accurate, but it is inherently skewed by their perspective. They may look at the world and see more bad than good, but perhaps they are just noticing more of the bad and overlooking the good – or in other words, “looking down.”

The city isn’t encroaching on his lonesome crowded west, “the lonesome crowded west” refers to the city, where despite there being more people, those people feel more isolated, and the city is encroaching on his rural life.

These lines might be about Cowboy Dan’s more cosmic sense of reality, and how that contrasts with a ‘normal’ person’s self-centeredness.

A walking person sees the Earth moving below them, as if the whole Universe is revolving around them. They don’t see themselves walking through the Universe.

A talking person believes they are definitely communicating with themselves or others, but in reality they are only making sounds and “moving their mouths.”

A person believes that they are getting a good look at things when they stare into the horizons, but in reality they are only looking down. Looking into space is looking up.

These three lines deal with perspective. In physics, motion is relative. When a person walks, that person is moving relative to the earth, but the earth is also moving relative to the person. Likewise when someone is talking, they are attempting to communicate an idea with someone or feel what they are saying is important enough to be spoken, but just moving your mouth implies nothing the person is saying is important. “Looking down” means to think someone is superior to others, so this person thinks they are looking at something objectively, but they are really looking at the situation with bias.

All of the comment interpretations are correct. The strength of this chorus is how well it carries these multiple meanings using only the repeated imagery of a car that won’t start.

Additionally, it implies that he regularly drives drunk.

Another possible meaning is that CD’s become so stagnant and stuck in his ways with the world changing around him that he’s stuck “motionless,” in a sense. Even if he’s clear and logical and not actively attempting to ignore or numb his current situation by drinking, he can’t shift himself out of his rut, or “get the engine running.”

The chorus plays on the classic conflict of “Cowboys vs Indians” by having Cowboy Dan fighting against an “engine,” pronounced identically to the dated slur “Injun”

If Cowboy Dan is stuck in the desert fighting the engine to get it started, he’s also in a life-or-death struggle.

Cowboy Dan is entitled and bitter due to his self-important “status”. However, to be a “major player in the cowboy scene” means practically nothing – what even is a cowboy scene? The following line implies his stardom doesn’t consist of much more than alcohol and proximity to Native Americans. Whatever it is, it’s certainly not relevant to the general listener – which is the point. The age of the cowboys is long over, but Dan clings to this aged archetype because it lets him feel important. This also implies that there are many other people who think similarly to him, Cowboy Dans in their own right.

Good observation, @HazelBee95. He used that exact image later in “Lampshades On Fire”.

In the 2012 Pitchfork Classics documentary, Isaac says he always imagined “The Cockroach” as a sort of grubby, dirty dance, like roaches scattering when the lights turned on.

I’ve always detected an allusion to Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis. The story is about a devoted-salesman, Gregor, who awakes one day as giant beetle–he had a fairly beetle-like existence before his metamorphosis, too. He was definitely doin' the cockroach, anyway.

This line could also possibly reference a scene in the movie Pulp Fiction.

Jules:
Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’d never know ‘cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I ain’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got enough sense enough to disregard its own feces.

Vincent:
How about a dog? Dogs eats its own feces.

Jules:
I don’t eat dog either.

One more thing, this is also ( I believe) an allusion to people watching TV and the drama on it being fun to watch but worthless (TV is also mentioned on other albums (Moon and Antarctica)

this is also a statement of ‘'WEll it looks good and tastes good but it’s really not good for you’‘ which can mean a lot of things in context to Isaac’s lyrics, notably on this album, alcohol and his town building malls and other crap that seems like a good idea but is worthless for the town

It really should say “routing through garbage” but I’ll defer to the liner notes.