This is the difficulty that Johnny Solo had:
Somewhere along the line Johnny had got the idea that he was made of a collection of parts, assuming his skin ended with the crack in his bum. For him the interior began when the tunnels of his ears went dark or closed around his lips. Johnny had come to believe that his skin was an envelope which made a transportable dam for his barrel of blood and guts. After his brain began to depart from his body, forming a cloud of electroÐchemical plasma (see e18), he began to think of his skin in a new way. He started to regard each pore as a receiver and transmitter of information and the whole organ became an infinite number of points of contact with the world as opposed to a protective sheath containing the architecture and plumbing of his body. Johnny reasoned each pore to be a flower visited and revisited by a multiplicity bees or a series of mouths that ate up information about the world: the temperature of the room, the texture of his clothes, the transmission of pheromonic information to other skins. The complexity of this image disgusted and fascinated Johnny, reminding him of the techno-rococo excesses of a Shaman video he'd once seen at Disgracelands. The thin layers of Johnny's skin; the husk of the epidermis clinging to the cauldron of nerves, blood vessels and hair roots of his dermis became indistinguishable from the skin of heat it transmitted or the skin of eddies and thermals that his newfangled ultra violet eye could see spiralling and mixing with the other heat skins around him.